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TABLEAU, No. 17. 

June 25, 1S72. 



T 



he Hospital Patient. 



I had come aboard the steamboat at Washington, on my way down 
the Potomac, to pay an annual spring visit to my relatives and friends 
at Fredericksburg. It was a fine morning, the vegetation half out and 
the air fresh and balmy. After reading the morning paper, (the Na- 
tional Intelligencer, the most able, impartial and respectable journal 
for many years, before or since, in the United States,) I walked out on 
deck to enjoy the view of the river banks and see, at a distance, the 
fishermen hauling ashore their vast seines | some more than a mile long, ) 
upon the sandy or pebly beach. Going to the side of the boat, just be- 
hind the larbord wheel, I saw a half grown youth, leaning on the rail- 
ing, with a crutch under his arm and his head bent over, looking in- 
tently at the glassy wave and white foam made by the paddles; the 
water of the River of Swans being, for the nonce, as clear as a crystal 
and reflecting, like a mirror, the green banks, leafy trees and waiving 
corn and wheat fields. I approached and stood quietly by his side, at 
a few feet distance, and did as he was doing. In a few moments, he 
raised his head, a smile faintly played around his large expressive 
mouth, and he made some remark about the swell of the boat and the 
wave which broke upon the shore, and which he seemed highly to 
admire. He was decently clad ( how, I forget, ) and very pale, and thin. 
His cheeks w r ere sunk and the bones prominent. His hair was long 
and flaxen, a portion of it escaping from under his straw hat and con- 
cealing a part "his high and white forehead. His eyes w T ere very 
large, (partly from emaciation,) and deer-like, soft and liquid, and they 
had the expression of one who had just gone through much suffering. 
His hands were smooth and they and his fingers well shapen, (showing 
gentle blood,) and his nails, which were let to grow longer than usual, 
were well trimmed and cleaned. After some little talk, in order to 
smooth the way, I asked him the Yankey question, "How he lost his 
leg." He did not reply "that it had been bit off," but said it had been 
amputated, about one month before in Washington, at the hospital by 



Dr - . naming him. He W been suffering dreadfully and for 

many months, with a white swelling in the knee joint, and, at last, by 
the advice of a country doctor and at the persuasion of his mother', he 
had gone up to the city for surgical aid, and here he was, after some 
weeks confinement to his bed and months and months of severe pain, 
relieved of his disease and his limb and returning home, with a hopeful 
heart, to his friends. I enquired who went to Washington with him ? 
He said no one. for his mother could not leave home and he had no one 
else to go with him. He told me that the amputation was not so pain- 
ful as the daily dressing. "The wrappings and bandages would stick to 
the wound and the doctor would be in a hurry and was rough in remov- 
ing them." Poor boy, thought I, how you missed your mother's tender 
hand and gentle nursing. How much must you have gone through in 
a hospital, at your age, alone and without the comforts of your own 
home." Our conversation was interrupted by the sounding of the 
Chinese gong, and, as he did not make the movement, I asked him if 
he was not going in to breakfast. He said no. I told him he must be 
hungry after breathing the morning air and ought to eat to give him 
strength. He coloured up and said he had not money enough to pay 
for his meal. He had enquired the price and had not the change to 
pay for a ticket. Then said I, "You shall go in and breakfast with 
me and I will make up for you the amount of your ticket, if you will 
allow me." After a little hesitation he consented, (I suppose he did 
not like to hurt me by a refusal, ) and entering the breakfast room, we 
found all the seats occupied but one, which he refused to take. The 
company, some fifty passengers, (coming from the North,) all saw us, 
for we stood at the solitary chair for several minutes and attracted gen- 
eral attention, yet no one rose to offer us a seat, though we might have 
passed for father and son or older and younger brother. The captain 
now rose and came forward from the extreme end of the table and urged 
me to take his seat. "No, said I, we will wait for the second table, that 
this youth and mvself may breakfast together." We then left the cabin, 
and, in half an hour's time had a comfortable meal together, seated side 
by side. I have breakfasted in my father's house, with a President of the 
United States, his cabinet of statesmen, the Chief Justice and other great 
characters, politicians and authors, on the occasion of laying the corner 
stone of a monument erected to the memory and over the remains of 
Mary, the mother of Washington— at the public tables of Saratoga, 
Newport and Long Branch (where assemble the big rich bugs, brawling 
leaders of parties and the loud toned, ringing, street and church belles 
of the Northern cities) and at all the other watering places of note in 



the Atlantic States — at the table of the richest commoner of Scotland, 
which was spread with hot house fruit and the delicacies of the London 
market and whose income was greater than my whole fortune — at the 
"table de 'Hote" of the capital cities and some of the famous baths and 
mineral springs of the continent, where were assembled nobility, reli- 
gion, wealth, fashion, beauty and refinement, contributed by various 
nations ; but candour compels me to confess that I recall with more 
satisfaction this plain and cheap breakfast on the Potomac (costing 
me about one dollar,) and remember it as the most grateful I had ever 
before, or since, enjoyed. I have sometimes mentioned it to my rich 
city friends, to illustrate the privations, sufferings and sorrows of the 
poor and humble. Some seemed touched by the story of the one-legged 
boy, others would interrupt me before I had finished my meal, or even 
taken my seat at the table with my young acquaintance, and I remem- 
ber a very rich, fashionable and beautiful lady, a great favorite of 
mine who, before I had even entered the breakfast room, hastily got 
up as though my story grated on her feelings, and saying to her com- 
panion, (who was paying me the cheap compliment of earnest atten- 
tion,) come, , (calling her by her first name, ) let us go up stairs in 

the billiard room. I did not follow them, but left the house and its- 
elegantly furnished room and never again ventured to tell the story 
until now. We proceeded on our way and passed Mount Vernon, when 
the bell of the boat gave a funeral toll of some minutes, as was its 
ancient wont. I passed since, in going to the Carnival, the tomb of 
the father of his country and no bell was sounded! This too within 
a dozen miles of the city of Washington. Nothing which I saw in the 
Capital wounded me so deeply. It is only in keeping, however, with 
the taste and tone of the vulgar, Rebel Government. In an hour or 
two we reached the landing, where my fellow passenger was to leave 
us. He had to go ashore in a small boat, which came out to meet us, 
and into which he descended from the deck, by a temporary and steep 
stairway, with much effort and not without assistance. On the bank 
of the river there were five or six men and women and a child or two 
standing (their saddle horses being tied to the branches of trees and a 
carriage drawn up under the shade of them,) with their faces turned 
upon the steamer to see the passengers embark. One of the females I 
supposed might be his mother. The steamer went on its way, scream- 
ing, whistling and puffing, leaving behind it a long dark column of 
smoke and, in its wake, a river of white foam. I have never since seen 
or heard of my impromptu breakfast acquaintance, though I have often 
passed up and down the river during the past twenty years, never forgot 



and always looked out for him, hoping by mere chance to meet him once 
more. Within the last five or six years, I have seen more men with 
but one leg or arm, than I think I ever before saw in all parts of the 
world during my whole life time, though now "somewhat declined in the 
vale of years." Some of the maimed, who walk on crutches, I know 
intimately, with the history of others I am familiar, but none interested 
me more deeply and u|ion so short an acquaintance, than did the brave 
young Mary lander, so heroic in suffering; a country boy, going from 
home, by himself, to a strange city, worn out with suffering, with the 
courage to face the pain of so fearful an amputation and the dread of 
death itself! Could anything have been more manly ? His suffering 
his courage, his fortitude, his fine soul and character won my heart at 
once and entirely. I would have liked to have seen the meeting be- 
tween the widowed mother and the maimed boy, on the shores of the 
Potomac. It must have been full of joy and sadness, joy to see her 
son return alive and healthy, sadness to think that he must grow up to 
manhood and go through life on crutches. But his is only one case. 
How many thousands and ten of thousands are there of men in the 
Southern States, who have lost a limb in war, or are incurably wounded ? 
Perhaps I felt the more interest in the Potomac youth, from remem- 
bering a boyish friend and school mate of mine, who died, when just in 
his teens, from the same disease and the effects of a similar amputation. 
He had a very beautiful young sister, I recollect, who went to our boy 
and girls' grammar school. I used to lend him my father's Scotch and 
English newspapers, (the London Times, Morning Chronicle, &c.,) to 
read the debates in Parliament, which, at that early age we criticised 
with much confidence and crudeness. We gave each other titles. I 
was Sir this, and he was Lord that, in our daily conversation. His father 
was a cabinet maker, and when he died, (as he did at home after a year 
or two of suffering,) I remember to have heard, that he made his 
son's black walnut coffin with his own hands ! He may not have felt 
as acutely as do persons in the higher classes of life, or he may have 
preferred, from love of his child, that no one should make it but him- 
self. Another similar case of this most painful and often fatal disease 
with which I met in my travels through the world, was the following : 
I had breakfasted heartily ,(upon the lighest and whitest loaf bread, 
with fresh butter \md creamy milk, ending with a cup of cordial coffee) 
at the Hot Springs in Virginia, after a morning drive from the 
Warm Springs, and had just taken my seat (being the first passenger 
in the coach,) on the middle bench, next the right hand window, and 
farthest from the door, for the sake of the shade, fresh air and view. 



5 

My daughter, whom I was taking to the White Sulphur Springs on a 
pleasure trip, was seated behind me. In a few moments, a small boy, 
seeming about twelve years of age, came to the stage door, supporting 
his wasted and tottering form on a crutch, and with much pain and 
trouble got in. Whether he was assisted or not, I do not remember. 
He probably was not. Trying to sit down nearly opposite me, he struck 
his stiff knee joint against rhe edge of the seat, screamed out with pain 
and began to cry most bitterly. He turned around to go out and called 
to his father, saying : "I can't ride in this stage, it hurts me too much. ' 
His father came to the door and said : "You must not get out, we will 
have to go," and he turned and went up the tavern portico, perhaps, t<> 
settle his bill. I then said to the little sufferer, "Come sit opposite me, 
and I will try to make you more comfortable." I arose, turned back 
the middle bench to make room and raising his invalid limb placed it 
between my seat and the window, on the feather pillow, winch he 
brought along with him. The other passengers took their places, ( t lie 
sister of the boy next my daughter,) and the father, last of all, on the 
front seat two removes from his son. He smiled and said, "You will 
ride easy now, you are more comfortable," or something like that, I 
said nothing, but felt very like giving him a rap over the knuckles for 
his neglect of the little patient. The door was shut, and the stage 
started over a rough road. At every rut and jolt the poor little fellow 
winced and I did so too. The road presently became smoother and he 
grew more easy, began gradually to make my acquaintance and talked 
to me about the scenery, the wood, the wild flowers and the birds, rab- 
bits and' squirrels, and other objects seen along our route, and quite 
cheered up. I took the more interest in the boy, from the first moment 
I saw him, as he was about the same age and not unlike my only sod, 
whom I lost at the age of thirteen, after several years of similar suffer- 
ing. In the course of the morning's drive, the father undertook to 
reprove me for some remark or a criticism which I made about my 
daughter's over admiration (as I thought it, ) of the scenery near the 
bridge over the clear and rapid waters of Jackson's river. The picture 
which struck her fancy, was a dam forming a limpid lake, with a foam- 
ing waterfall and busy mill below. I said it was very pretty, perhaps 
beautiful, but not uncommon or grand, or something to that effect. I 
was very wroth, and at a reproof coming from such a quarter, felt more 
indignation than I cared to express ; for I did not like that the son 
should hear me reproach his father for his gross and cruel neglect of him 
and want of parental tenderness. I could have hit him very hard, but 
I C( atented myself with a particular look and tone, slightly expressive 



6 

e»f surprise and anger. The boy kept his seat opposite me the whole 
journey, arrived at the springs quite comfortable and happy, and, after 
a few days, drove away with his father and sister, over the rough road 7 
to some other watering place in the mountains of Virginia. This was 
the first and last I ever saw of my little stage coach acquaintance. I 
often enquired about him from persons from his father's neighborhood, 
and think I was at last told that he was dead, whereby, I suppose, he 
was saved much suffering. He was a descendent of the heroic and 
tender-hearted Pochahontas, (the daughter of the Indian king Powha- 
tan) who saved the life of her father's prisoner, the valliant Captain 
Smith. Another case of similar kind, strange to say, happened to me on 
my way to the Warm Springs, with a brief mention of which this tab- 
leau will be closed. Having got out of the cars at the proper railroad 
station, I had taken a back seat to avoid the heat of the sun. Two 
men in humble life, mechanics, I suppose, came to the coach door, one 
(I think an Irishman,) leaning on his companion's arm, who helped 
him to get in with difficulty, his knee being stiff and painful. He had, 
as I afterwards learned, rheumatic white swelling, or simple inflamma- 
tory rheumatism, for which he was going to use the Hot Spring bath. 
Seating himself by my side he raised and laid his limb across the mid- 
dle bench and his comrade placed himself nest him. Five other male 
passengers got in, making, in all, eight persons. The stage agent then 
came to the coach door and said, "Make room for another passenger, 
there are seats for nine." The patient, or sick man, said, "My knee 
joint is stiff and very painful. I cannot bend it. I was promised at 
Richmond the use of two seats." "Your ticket calls for but one, re- 
plied he, and you must put down your leg or get out," and he insisted 
on it vehemently. My blood was up and began to boil in an instant. 
I was most indignant and felt like cursing the inhuman brute to his face, 
but ruled my tongue and only said, "Your conduct is most shameful 
and cruel ; it is a disgrace to the whole State, and you, sir, are no Vir- 
ginian." I was ready to jump out of the stage door and smash his nose 
and mouth with my fist clenched, which I could have done at one blow 
and disfigured him for life ; (for he was but a thin, middle sized man, 
and I much larger and stronger, and withal an expert and practiced 
boxer,) but I thought that would not mend the matter. The passengers 
were all silent, waiting the result and expecting a scene. I, of course, 
could have settled the case by paying for the extra seat myself, but I 
did not choose to make such an offer ; for the two men insisted that its 
use was promised by the ticket man at Richmond, whence they had 
come, and it was not credible to my mind, that the stiff kneeded one 



would have started on so long a journey without such a stipulation. 
The agent hesitated, thought better and yielded the point. Perhaps 
there was something in my tone, look and manner which he was not 
used to and did not like. He shut the door with a slam, mounted with 
the driver, and we started far the Warm Springs, where we arrived to 
tea without any accident. Will it be believed that the scoundrel wanted 
the seat for himself! The sun was, perhaps, too hot for him to side out- 
side, and when one of the way passengers got out on the roadside, he 
took his place and began again, and at once, to wrangle with the sick man 
about his legal right to rest the stiff and swollen knee joint across the 
middle bench on which two passengers were seated. Of his moral right 
to do so, he seemed to be as insensible as a blind man is of color. The 
choleric Irishman and his friend used very hot words and I expected to 
see the parties come to blows. After the argument, (to our great annoy- 
ance,) had been kept up for an hour, or more, on so plain a point, I had 
again to interpose as a volunteer and silence Mr. Hobson, [for that was 
the agent's name,] whose horses, being driven to death, day and night, 
were called 'Hobson's choice," with traditional propriety. If he is still 
living in Virginia, or has gone back to New England, [whence I sup- 
pose he came, as many of the stage agents did,] he can verify the truth 
of my narrative, and my fellow stage coach passengers, if any survive, 
can attest his inhumanity on that day. 

[The greater part of this tableau was written on Sunday morning. 
June 25th, before going to church.] 



o. 1: 



June 25, 1872. 



THE SHIPWEECK. 

" Full many a gem of purest ray serene 
The dark, unfathomed caVes of ocean bear." 

With the captain of the Potomac steamer, (the name of which I 
think was the Mount Vernon), I became well acquainted, from making 
repeated trips for many years up and down that river. He perished 
afterwards at sea, in the ill-fated steamer, "the Arctic." I had re- 
turned from Europe in this packet the fall before she was lost, with so 
many valuable lives and so rich a freight. My impression of her man- 
agement, from an observation of ten or eleven days, was most unfa- 
vorable, and I advised my friends, when she was mentioned, or I spoke 
of my voyage home, not to make a trip in her to Europe. For her 

captain I had a great contempt as a seaman. His experience, I 

heard, had been derived from commanding a boat that plied, in the day 
time, and in still water, between New York and Albany ; where he 
could have learned but little of the navigation of a stormy sea, and 
that, too, in a freighted steamer of a different model. In such cases, 
where the ship and passengers are lost from the want of due care and 
proper skill in the commanding officer, the directors who appointed 
him seem to me to be highly culpable, if not confederates before the 
act, aiding and abetting in his crime of homicide. To attempt a busi- 
ness, or undertake to do for a compensation, what one does not under- 
stand, where the lives and safety of others are concerned, [and I would 
extend this principle even up to the office of President of the United 
States], seems to me to be a great offence or crime. The ignorant and 
unskillful negro engineer, for instance, of the New York ferry boat, 
[Grant and Greeley seem to me to be not much better], who, when 
drunk, burst its boiler, blew up the boat and killed, drowned and scal- 
ded to death, or scarred for life many citizens of New York, should, in 
my opinion, have been hung or sent to the penitentiary, and the Presi- 
dent of the Company, or those who appointed such an incompetent 
engineer, along with him to keep him company. To return from this 



9 

digression, to the captain of the lost steamer, he slept at night and was 
promenading the deck the live long day, gallanting the belles and beau- 
ties, the "bright Auroras of our arctic circle." To the one of them, 
who attracted me most by her beauty and grace, I gave the above appella- 
tion and Longfellow's novel, Outre mere, and wrote in the fly leaf ( being 
myself a widower eighteen months old and quoting an expression of my 
friend Willis', the real born poet) that she was "the illuminated page" 
in the travels of her greatest and oldest admirer. I had known and 
sat near her at table for about a week, and was, perhaps, jealous of the 
captain's attention. On her arrival at New Orleans she married her 
lover and has long since forgotten her flirtation with me, a stranger 
my name and how I was charmed with the beautiful manner in which 
she read and recited the choicest lines of poetry. Her hands and fingers 
and nails were the most exquisite I ever saw, and she was perfectly 
refined and polished. "Puella facta ad unguem," as Horace says, she 
was the diamond of the first water and all the others but charcoal, 
mere leather and prunella. The unfortunate captain of the Arctic dif- 
fered quite as widely from my acquaintance, Captain C, of the Baltic. 
(to whom I took a letter of introduction, ) and who was an old day and 
night navigator of Long Island Bound, where he learned to use his eyes 
and ears and head, and became "an old salt" of the stormy sea. At 
twilight he would come on deck, telescope in hand, and watch the live 
long night. When we had descried, during the last afternoon of the 
voyage, the soft, green, pincushion hills of "Ould Ireland," and entered 
Saint George's channel, I arose an hour or so before day, and found 
the captain, with his glass, on the forward deck. No one but he and I 
seemed to be astir. The crew, no doubt, were at their posts. He told 
me he did not sleep at night and I do not remember ever to have seen 
him walking the deck in the day time. He presided, indeed, at the 
dinner table and used a glass blown hollow and filled partly with some 
red liquid to resemble wine ; so that he might pour out but a few drops 
and drink as little as possible, out of mere compliment. At table the 
last day some one got up a string of resolutions and proposed them, 
with his health. He seemed not to like it, said he had only done his 
duty, for which he was paid a salary and that such compliments were 
uncalled for. That was the substance of his speech, as short and quite 
as sensible as one of President Grant's. He did not, however, confess 
having "made any mistakes or promise to avoid all errors in future 
arising from ignorance of his duties." I was much pleased with his 
'bogus' wine glass and his sterling sense and worth and skill. On the 
other hand the captain of the Arctic sat long at the head of the table 
2 



10 

with a column of "Auroras" on his right hand and on his left, drinking 
his wine, and, for aught I know, betweemmeals, his old cogniac, like a 
gentleman and ladies' man, as he was ambitious to appear. I remem- 
ber one day at dinner, the steamer stopt of a sudden in a rough sea, 
causing some surprise and no little fear to the ladies and some of the 
more timid male passengers. Our captain did not move from his seat, 
but sat still and, I think, sent a raw Irish waiter to see what was the 
matter and bring him word, instead of going at once, as was his bounded 
duty. I got up to relieve the fears of "my bright Aurora," (who was 
from a sugar slave State or estate, and very sweet, soft and Southern,) 
and of others not so bright, et cetera, and going to the scene of action, 
found that the stoppage was owing to some accident to the larbord 
wheel, which could be repaired in an hour or two. I returned to the 
dining room with a cheerful face and said aloud to my friends on en- 
tering, "that it was only a trifle," thus relieving the anxiety of the 
whole company, who, thereupon, finished their dinner with the more 
satisfaction from this little interruption. Extensive prospects are seen 
through small openings, (the firmament, through a pin hole,) and this 
to me was one of them. It revealed to my mind the captain's incapa- 
city. He knew not what had happened. The sudden stopping of a 
steamer under fall way in the ocean, is always an alarming circum- 
stance to those who know not what its cause. It might have been from 
the breaking of the shaft, by which in such stormy weather as we had 
nearly the whole passage, the ship and all aboard might have been 
lost. I remember one day it was so rough and the steamer rolled so much, 
that every person aboard or nearly so, was sea sick, and I and another 
person, an old voyager, were the only two persons out of forty or fifty 
plates at our table. He sat at the head, looking back at Scotland, and 
I at the foot, looking towards my home, then in Maryland. At our 
last dinner aboard, the captain treated the company (at the expense of 
the directors or rather stockholders) with champagne; one bottle to 
two or three persons. I and my mess refused to drink it and I paid for 
mine : so much did we disapprove of his management of the ship, to 
which we had trusted our lives. Thus much as to what I know about 
the Arctic and her captain before she was lost by a collision with an 
iron French steamer. Had the captain of the A. been an experienced 
seaman, like Capt. C, and not a river or fresh water sailor, had he 
been stationed on the forward deck, and on the lookout himself that 
dark, dark night, he would, Columbus like, with eyes taught by prac- 
tice to discern objects dimly seen in the dark and ears erect to catch 
the slightest noise, have been the first to see the light of the coming 



11 

steamer, or if she had none, the sparks of her engine or her hulk, or 
heard the motion of her wheels or had some notice of her approach and 
avoided, at least, a fatal collision. His first and great error was, before 
knowing the true condition of his own ship and applying promptly the 
proper remedy, (a sail passed under her keel and brought up her sides 
to stop (lie leak,) was to ^vnd his first mate, his best seaman, (the boat- 
swain or second mate would have answered the purpose,) to board the 
French steamer and ask assistance. He should have tolled his bell, 
sent up a rocket, and at once fired a'signal gunof distress kept loaded for 
that purpose; for the reasonable calculation was that the colliding steamer, 
if sinking, would not leave thespot, and if not much injured, would come, 
to his assistance. Why the French steamer held on its course and was 
able to reach France, was explained in the papers, but not satisfactorily to 
my mind. There was a dilemma in the case. She was not too much 
damaged to reach a port, and, therefore, should have awaited daylight 
or communicated with the Arctic to render assistance, or receive it, in 
the other alternative. The first mate lost sight of both steamers and 
never returned. But my main purpose is not to criticise or condemn 
the conduct of the captain, (who lost his nerve and presence of mind 
and with them the command of the ship and crew and was like "a hen 
with its head cut off,' ) but to mention one or two incidents connected 
with the sinking of tin- steamer. The head engineer, at tins tim< , of 
the Arctic, had been, as I said, in a former page, the captain of the' 
Potomaek boat, Mount Vernon, the command of which, with its plain 
sailing on a placid river, lie ha;! been tempted to leave for more pay 
ami sea room. He w.-^d to be very particular in his dress, quite a 
dandy and he was very courteous and quite polished from the company 
he had kept on the Potomaek, chiefly .gentlemen and ladies from Vir- 
ginia and the South. What was my surprise to find him in Novem- 
ber, 1853, the engineer of the Arctic, as black as smoke and coat (last 
could make him, ami his coarse clothes from head to heel saturated 
with train or stinking fish oil. He recognised me, we exchanged salu- 
tations and a tew remarks, he showed me the machinery, and that was 
the last I ever saw of him. He never appeared on deck, being, I sup- 
pose, ashamed of his costume. "Quantum mutat us abillo Hectore!" 
''How changed, was Hector from his ancient self," as I used to see him, 
sailing on the River of Swans, and washed as clean, with linen white as 
tiny. After the collision, when there was nothing aboard but confu- 
sion and despair, the boat sinking rapidly and the fire in the furnace 
put out, my valiant captain of the engineers, it was credibly reported, 
issued from the engine room (hot as the black hole at Calcutta) with 



12 

hi* firemen, some twenty or twenty-five, armed with knives, (fearful 
apparition!) opened a way to the longboat, which the passengers were 
vainly attempting to launch, drove them off, took possession, lowered 
her, jumped in, letting no one else come aboard, and, without food or 
water, left the steamer with all the rest of her crew and several hun- 
dred passengers, members of the leading families of the country, to go 
down in mid-ocean ! He was never more, himself, nor his crew of cut- 
throats, nor his long boat heard from ! When I was told what he had 
done, and some of the public journals, for weeks, were expressing the 
hope, or opinion, that he and his cruel crew might reach the coast of 
the United States, or Newfoundland, I always said, I wished he and 
his firemen might never more reappear. Whether they were drowned 
or died by hunger and thirst, none can tell. 

The ship is still missing, her mariners sleep, 
Ten thousand feet down in the depths of the deep, 
How each faced his fate, will never transpire. 
Whether crushed amid icebergs, or burnt up by fire. 

What countryman the lost engineer was I know not and never 
asked. Among the persons lost on the Arctic was a New York lawyer 
of learning and reputation, the member of a firm which transacted my 
legal business. He would not enter one of the boats, which was filled 
with his friends who escaped. When the rope was let go and the 
launch dropped astern, he was last seen standing near the rudder of 
the ship, waiving his white handkerchief, though he expected to be 
drowned iu a few minutes ! One person lost several adult members of 
his family. He was,a very rich man. Some years after the event, I 
saw him in church, in deep mourning. To my eye he appeared to 
have received a chill in the heart, from which he would never recover. 
A signal gun was now fired for relief, and a youth, a young sailor, who 
was aboard and knew the working of cannon, took upon himself that 
duty, while the rest were busy devising some means of escape or had given 
up all hope and had settled down in mute despair. He continued to 
load and fire his gun long after all hope was gone, and applied his 
match to the last charge just as the boat went down and swallowed him 
within its whirlpool. Who would not be proud to be the father of so 
noble a boy, though his bones now lie "in the deep bosom of the ocean 
buried," Ye minute, incessant and untiring workers of the sea, I 
charge you to consecrate his mortal remains, "his canonised bones," 
with a beautiful tomb of your purest white coral, strew it with your 
most exquisite flowers, both white and red, and surround and protect it 
with a grotto of your rarest workmanship! Ye weeping, mourning sea 



13 

nymphs, watch over the hallowed spot and lament the dead boy, until 
the sea, too, shall give up its multitude of the dead! So much for the 
Arctic, in which I, too, might have perished with a circle of friends, 
and my "bright Aurora;" and in which went down many a fair woman, 
equally beautiful or lovely in the eyes of her youthful admirer or fond 
husband. When I first heard of the loss of this steamship with so 
many passengers, I remember that my arms flew up as if shocked with 
a stroke of lightning. 

Written June 24 and 25, 1872. 



TABLEAU, No. 19. 



June 25, 1872. 



SOUTHERN CHIVALRY. 

A year or two after the loss of the Arctic, as narrated in Tableau,. 
No. 18. an United States mail steamer foundered off the coast of 
flowery Florida, almost within sight of its orange groves and, within 
reach of her fragrant breezes and " spicy gales." She was command< I 
by a fellow townsman and an old grammar school and classmate of 
mine, who was, at the same time, a captain, or officer, in the Federal 
navy. He had been the littlest boy in school and, when he grew up to 
manhood, he was below the medium size, but he had a great heart 
and soul within his small frame. This steamer had met with some 
former accident, or misfortune, which caused her owners to change her 
name and route, and she was suspected and said not to have been sea- 
worthy. On this occasion she was disabled in a storm, at night, by the 
breaking of her crank or shaft, whereby the wheels would not work 
and the fire in her furnace was extinguished by the huge waves, which 
buffered her hulk and poured over her sides, and at whose mercy she 
lay rolling, and creaking and groaning, like some great dying '' monster 
of the deep." When all hope of saving his ship was gone, the Vir- 
ginia captain had the boats carefully launched and saw every passenger, 
and sailor, and person aboard comfortably and safely seated, and by 
his care, and skill and courage they, or the greater pail of them, were 



14 

saved, i think none, or but few, beside himself were lost. He firmly 
refused to leave his sinking ship, though solicited and urged to take a 
place in one of the boats, as I have been credibly informed. This is 
not a very unusual thing with a captain, who feels that he has been to 
blame, or may still have a spark of hope left, that the ship may not 
go down. But this was not the case with my school friend. His skill 
aud prudence could not forsee and guard against the breaking of bad 
machinery, and there was not a possibility of his ship or his own life 
being saved by his remaining aboard. To the last female passenger, 
whom he handed into the boat, he gave his watch (it was a silver one 
and probably a family relic), as a memento or dying gift to his young 
wife at home: (he was himself under middle age) having no further 
use for it aboard ship, and being clone with Time. As the steamer 
settled, plunged and sank to the bottom of the Gulf stream, he was seen 
standing alone and solitary on the deck, in grand and awful self-pos- 
session, to raise his officer's cap, as if to salute the grisly King of Terror 
( now captain of the ship), omii reverent submission to his fate. Down 
went the ship, carrying with it him and the flag of his country's floating 
at the pole, for his winding sheet. The boats, which had paused, at a 
little distance, to behold the harrowing spectacle, (at which, an old 
heathen Greek would have said the gods looked down with pleasure 
and admiration), the boats freighted with the crew and passengers, 
" Hi spectitati virtutis," witnesses of his self-immolation, now turned 
their prows towards the coast, plied their oars with lusty arms, and, 
with much toil and suffering, reached the shore and landed on the beach 
in safety, or were picked up by vessels passing at sea. Happy in the 
time and manner of von death, who did'st not survive to witness the 
wreck of the Constitution and the breaking up of our Union once glo- 
rious, happy and free ; rise spirit of my early friend! Companion of 
my departed youth ! arise from the depths of the briny deep, with the 
once unstained star spangled banner, (unstained with the best blood of 
Virginia and the South,) for your ascension robe, mount up to the 
highest and brightest skies in mid-heaven, (from which that banner was 
fabled to have been taken,) restore it to the American eagle, torn by 
my hand from its soiled and bloody stripes and folds, when erst trans- 
lated to the Zodiac. There take your proper place and form, as a bril- 
liant star upon the neck of Jove's messenger; the bird of what was 
once my country, which guards forever the heart of Washington (itself 
transferred to the breast' of Leo) of Washington, the great warrior, 
statesman and patriot son of Virginia, whose immortal name is indisso- 
lubly connected with the history of your native town and none of whose 



15 

actions eclipses your grand and heroic one in the hour of death ! In 
the presence of even his constellation, your star will not "pale its in- 
effectual fire," but will shine with undiminished lustre. 
Written June 25, 1872. 



TABLEAU, No. 20. 

June 25, 1872. 



SoUTHEP v N pALLANTP v Y, 

The subject of shipwreck, especially those in which I have lost friends 
or had them long missing, has, a strange attraction for my pen. In my 
early boyhood, I poured over and devoured four or five volumes con- 
taining the most noted or fearful which had occurred throughout the 
world, and they made a lasting, deep impression on my mind, especially 
those in which the crew and passengers perished by hunger and thirst. 
Death by thirst is said to be much more terrible and its sufferings far 
more dreadful than from starvation. In this tableau I shall give a 
glimpse at a shipwreck, in which I lost by famine one of my village 
and early friends, just after his attaining to manhood. We were very 
congenial, especially so was he to me. I admired his spirit and supe- 
rior knowledge of the world, his grace, graciousness, his conversation 
and tact and his politeness and kindness towards every one. He was 
beloved by his humble friends and acquaintances, by his body servant, 
for all of whom, as well as myself, he had a kind of fascination. In my 
journey through life, I have met with several such characters. Every 
one old and young likes them, and their companions wish to be, or 
thought to be, on terms of the closest intimacy or strictest friendship 
with them. They have affluence of conversation, easy manners and 
good nature, or what the French call bonhomie. They are not exactly 
selfish, but usually think themselves entitled to the best of everything 
and yet can do without it' but their friends take pleasure in gratifying 
them and feel compensated for favors conferred by a gracious accept- 
ance, cordial thanks, or even a kind smile. The qualities in a woman, 



16 

especially a young and beautiful one, make her a great belle. She has 
any number of admirers and suitors, is discreet in her choice and usually 
marries prudently, and from affection. One of Dickens' heroiues is a 
queen-bee. I suppose that both the king and female queen -bee have 
more knowledge of the world, quicker perception, and more common 
sense than usual, a great power of adaptation and a chamelion like 
faculty of taking the complexion of the persons about them. The 
danger is, as they advance in life, that they fall into the sin of selfish- 
ness, and do not deny themselves sufficiently. Add to what I have 
said of my youthful friend, he had a younger sister whom I admired, 
and an older one of strange beauty and loveliness, who married a man 
of refinement and education (he being, as well as her brother and my- 
self, a graduate of Yale College), emigrated to Florida and lived 
(died too, alas!) in a cottage ornee. Here one day, during the absence 
of her husband there came up a terrific storm of wind and rain, 
thunder and lightning. In her terror she started to run out of the 
house and, just as she reached the door, an enormous tree, growing 
within reach, was uprooted and crushed, in its fall, the cottage and 
herself at on fell blow. Her children, too little girls escaped. I saw 
them when they were nearly grown up to be young women, just after the 
death of their father, on their way to visit then their heart broken 
grand parents, who had removed back to Scotland, the native land of 

old Mr. , to die, like the haunted hare, (hunted in his case, alas! 

by misfortune) in its bed. They were not so beautiful as their mother, 
who, with a dozen other belles of the village were the most beautiful 
women, (and their names is legion) that I have ever seen on either 
side of the Atlantic. This beauty was hereditary, having been 
imported from Old England by their great grand mothers, who 
were ladies to the manor born, and had small hands and high 
insteps, soft voices, sweet tempers, lovely forms and beautiful faces. 
I would not mention this fact, but that it is notorious throughout 
Virginia. During a five years' residence and much travel in and 
through New England, I did not see as many lovely women, as 
I had left at home, nor did I meet more than two or three of the fair 
descendants of the " Puritan fathers and mothers " whose loud and 
sharp, shrill voices did not grate upon my ear and whose manners did 
not, in some point, offend my Southern tastes and sentiments. This 
may seem to be a harsh criticism, but candor compels me to tell the 
honest truth. My opinion on this subject was formed and expressed 
often and long before the late civil war. Speaking of storms, which 
twist off the tops and limbs of large trees, or tear them up by the roots, 



17 

I shall here mention one to whose fury I was exposed, and in which 
like Horace (the courtier poet, not political polecat,) I came near being 
crushed by the fall of not one, but of a thousand forest trees. Travel- 
ing in the Northwest, ( the gift of Virginia to the Federal Government I 
some twenty -five or thirty years ago, where such cyclones are not un- 
common, I had just reached, in the interior of Michigan, the edge of 
one of its small and beautifully clear and placid lakes, (called Silver 
Lake, I think,) which mirrored the forest that nearly surrounded its 
sandy shore, near which, on the north side, was placed the rude dwell- 
ing of a western emigrant. There was a very black cloud rising in the 
southwest, and I had passed the house and was just about to enter a 
dense wood or forest of primitive growth and filled with mammoth 
trees of all kinds common to that rich soil, when the proprietor came 
hastily out of the front door, called to me and said he did not like the 
looks of that thunder cloud in the south and that I had better turn 
back and stop until the storm was over. As a prudent man, with a 
young wife and children to support, I concluded to do so, though I did 
not fear much danger and was anxious to proceed on my journey, the 
object of which was to revisit a large body of government wild lands 
(nine or ten thousand acres, ) which I had taken up a dozen years pre- 
viously, and in so doing, by the by, had ridden about eight hundred 
miles, on one horse, in all kinds of weather, wet and dry, hot and cold 
over all sorts of roads, "per devias vias, et qua nulla via est," and Indian 
trails, and through the pathless woods, from the shores of Lakes Huron 
and Michigan down to Cincinnati and the banks of the gentlv 
flowing Ohio. Hardly were my horses stabled by the white driver and 
I seated with the old emigrant and his wife, looking out the window 
and awaiting the event, before the black and boiling cloud came furi- 
ously on, driven by a blast of wind, the breath of a hurricane, that fell 
upon the earth like a bolt, turned the placid lake into a stormy sea, 
"done in little," raised its ripples into "yeasty waves," which rolled 
ashorein quick succession, lashed the pebly beach, leapt over thegrassy 
bank and hurled their spray half way to our log cabin. The tops and 
large limbs of huge oak and other trees were twisted and broken off, 
and went sailing away before the wind like the down of a thistle before 
the human breath ! I forget whether there was much rain or thunder 
and lightning, but I think there was not. The emigrant was greatly 
concerned about his two sons who were out during the whole storm. He 
walked the floor and said, "I wonder the boys did not know better. 
They must have seen the rising cloud and should have come to the 
house in time. I hope they did not leave the field and go into the 
3 



18 

woods," and kept looking through the back or north window for their 
return. The mother sat knitting, still and pale and said but little. Being 
myself afraid that a tree might be blown down or one of its limbs broken 
off (I saw them flying in every direction) and fall upon the roof to crush 
it and us, I started for the front door and partly opened it, when the 
owner urged me, in a tone of remonstrance to stay within and I did so. 
It required all my strength of arms, knees and feet to close the door in 
the face of the wind. I had to put my shoulder to it. To quiet my 
fears, he said there were no trees left standing near enough to fall upon 
the house, though I still felt uneasy, lest the top or limb of a large one 
in front might be blown through the air far enough to reach and crush 
the house and those within. Outside I could have stood on the espla- 
nade in front of the lake, seen them coming and stept aside to avoid the 
blows. Some limbs which fell upon the lawn, like vast lances, hurled 
by the mighty hand of the storm king, large as a weaver's beam or the 
spear of Goliath, (which word means revolution) buried their rugged 
but-ends in the earth and shook the ground on which the house stood to 
its top and made it tremble like a tall leafy tree under the steady stroke 
of the stalwart axeman. In about one hour's time the storm had blown 
over; the two sons, who remained in the field (I think they said they 
had to lay flat on their faces to prevent being blown away) returned in 
safety to their father and mother's great relief of mind, (he gave them 
a rapping scold for giving him so much anxiety) and I proceeded on 
my journey. It is highly probable that had I not been stopt before 
entering the forest I would not now be writing out this passage in my 
Michigan tour, of which I kept copious notes made twice a day, (at 
dinner and at night) of everything I saw and incident that happened 
and that I am indebted for my life to the kind and hospitable emigrant, 
to whom I returned my cordial thanks at parting. The road, a narrow 
one, was strew r ed with the dead limbs and live branches of trees and 
many large ones, whose roots were weak from age, had fallen across its 
bed, which I had much trouble in passing around with my horses and 
carriage. This wood fall or "windfall," as such storms or cyclones are 
quaintly called in the 'Great Northwest,' (the word properly means 'a 
large and unexpected legacy,') had passed through the Peninsula State 
("Si queris Peninsulam amcenam, circumspice," as Governor General 
Cass said of Michigan, in giving it a motto, meanly and unmeaningly 
plagarising from the epitaph of Sir Christopher Wren, the architect of 
Grand Cathedral of Westminster Abbey) from south to north and 
made, or left, its tracks with the finger or foot of violence, though the 
primeval forests of that Radical State, uprooting and prostrating tens 



19 

of thousands of trees, or tearing them limbness for a space and distance, 
in a belt, twenty miles wide by three or four times that length. One 
small house which I passed, had several very large and tall oaks blown 
down and fallen near and in the direction of the front door. I traced 
its course myself, for about a week, a distance of sixty miles, to the 
banks of the grand river, where I crossed it on a good bridge at a spot 
at which, twelve years before, I had to swim my horse, in October, 
over its cold wide stream and then pursue an Indian trail for ten 
miles along its woody banks, in the land of the Indian, a large body of 
whom I met on my return, when riding alone through the woods and 
unarmed. They might have taken my scalp and money, but only said 
in passing "bon jour," to which I answered "good morning," walking 
my horse to show an appearance of not being afraid until I got past 
their long single file or line of march and turned an angle, when I put 
both spurs and the whip to my jaded steed and did not stop until I had 
reached the banks of the river and placed it between me and them. The 
above mentioned hurricane or cyclone of "the delightful peninsula" (as 
teacher Cass calls it, in a line of Americanised or Yankeyised Latin,) 
mav, for aught I know, have reached even unto Thunder bay, the Straights 
of Mackinaw or SaultSt. Mary. I am able, therefore, to form a fair idea 
of the fiery hurricane, with a breath of flame, which, some months 
since, crossed the entire breadth of Wisconsin and Michigan, prostrating 
and burning everything in its path, like the consuming wrath of an 
incensed Providence, when an angel of destruction "rides upon the whirl- 
wind and directs the storm." But enough of myself and escape, for which, 
perhaps, I may, like many others, not have been at the time sufficiently 
thankful to a kind Providence, and I return to the more agreeable sub- 
ject of my youthful friend. The attractions of his sisters (the younger 
one followed her sister's example, married and removed from home to- 
some of the British possessions,) and our fathers being wealthy and fel- 
low-countrymen (our names are each pure Scotch) was a bond of affinity 
between us youths in our teens ; beside which, he wished to intermarry 
in my family, but the fates forbid it, to his and my disappointment. I 
went to college, whither he had preceded me a year or two, (for he was 
a little my senior,) and he followed his married sister to Florida, where 
he settled. Returning North some years afterwards, as it was his habit 
to do annually on his way to the springs, Saratoga or Newport, (the last 
time I saw him was on the battery in New York,) he embarked at Savan- 
nah, in the packet steamer bound for New York, (via Charleston,) 
which was lost with many passengers, a day or two's sail from the last 
mentioned city, and he perished with them. The papers of the day 
gave a full account of the disaster and the sufferings of the survivors. 



20 

I shall confine myself to the case of my youthful friend and that of an 
acquaintance from the South, who was a married man and had his wife 
and family of children with him, his whole treasure embarked iu one 
frail vessel. There was an explosion of the boiler, (if my memory 
serves me,) a thing that ought never to be allowed to happen, and 
which, as I think, never has, by any accident, happened on the James, 
Rappahannock or Potomack river, and but two or three times on Ches- 
apeake bay, from the first use of steamboats down to the present day ; 
half a century. Very few or none ever occur on the Thames, where 
they are passing up and down, like railroad cars, in New York, every 
few moments. The steamer was disabled, and, being very much shat- 
tered, began to fill. There was time and discipline enough on board, to 
rig a rude raft, on which a number of the passengers hastily embarked; 
the boats, as usual, not having a capacity to hold all of them, together 
with the crew. It was evident that the steamer must soon go down and 
all that could do so left the deck, except my friend, the married man, 
who got the possession and use, for his party, of a small boat, lying for- 
ward, which may have been alloted to him, into which he put his whole 
family, his wife, "little chicks and all," and stood by their distracted 
side to right and manage the boat, while the wreck should gradually 
settle and calmly sink, as he vainly expected or hoped it would do. 
Contrary to his calculation at the last moment, it heaved, plunged 
like "a monster of the deep," went down in a whirlpool, as a matter of 
course, and (oh, horror of horrors !) swallowed up his whole family be- 
fore his starting eyeballs! His young wife, his "little chicks and all." 
The father floated, clung to a spar or oar, swam to a boat or the raft, 
and escaped. He was a youngish man, at the time, with dark hair, 
When I met him, some years thereafter, at a watering place, it was 
nearly white and he was still very sad and seemed to be very pious. 
Like a bird whose nest is broken up and young ones killed, or taken 
away, in the spring, not too late to build again, he was young 
enough to have a second wife and family. I had known her or her 
sister as a belle and Virginia beauty. Second marriages, I have ob- 
served, are not so happy as the first match, when it is from affection. 
To this second marriage I think there could have been no possible 
objection, and I was glad to find that he had new objects of love and 
affection to fill the aching void in his heart. I saw him very often 
afterwards and always felt a strange interest in meeting him. My vil- 
lage friend had got upon the raft, and with some twenty or thirty per- 
sons, men and women, was exposed to the broiling sun (it was a very 
hot season,) many days, with little or nothing to eat or drink. Some 



21 

died of exhaustion, of hunger and thirst, and wore thrown to thesharks 
Some went mad, others wept, sat still in dispair or lay down praying 
to die. It was affirmed by one of the passengers, whom I for many years 
personally knew, (he was a duelist and carried a painful bullet in his 
hip to the grave) and who escaped, (a skeleton in clothes!) that, in the 
delirium of hunger and thirst and despair, a proposition was whispered 
around to draw lots, who should be killed, (horrid proposal ! ) to keep 
life in the survivors! This charge, however, was indignantly denied in 
the public papers by some of the survivors who said that they had 
heard nothing of the kind mentioned, and that it was, no doubt, the 
conceit of a disturbed imagination : which, possibly, may have been 
true. The sufferings of the crowded raft had reached their climax. 
Few would have survived the day, but the burning sun and the fiery 
heavens were veiled in thick clouds, [how wistfully were these wasted 
faces and hollow eyes now turned upwards !] and how they did thank 
God, who in his mercy, in his pity, yea in his pity akin to human, shed 
his refreshing shower upon their then burning heads and blistered bodies. 
Their mouths were held up and open to receive the rain. It was caught 
in the palms of their wasted hands, wrung from their saturated clothing 
and drunk greedily. Death from thirst, I repeat, is said to lie much 
more painful than from hunger. I have read a story often told of the 
Chevalier Bayard, the knight without fear and without reproach, which 
is usually mentioned as the finest of all his fine acts of self denial and 
heroism. When he lay wounded and bleeding, weak and thirsty on 
the field of battle, a small portion of turbid water having been offered 
him to drink, he refused it and said "give it to that poor wounded or 
dying soldier. He needs or wants it more than I." I do not question 
the judgment which the world has passed upon this act of self-abnega- 
tion and humanity, or deny that it sounds well and will continue to do 
so, in the ears of posterity. I only remark, that this noble action was 
done on terra firma, after no fasting [he had eaten his breakfast and 
drank his cup of tea or coffee] and that there must have been an 
abundance of pure water to be drawn from wells or sparkling springs 
not far off, and to drink was not a question with him of life or death, 
but of time, of but an hour or two. His refusal to drink a cup of ditch 
water, under such circumstances, and passing it to his wounded soldier 
has to my mind, little of self denial and more of display, or even 
pleasantry, than it does of heroism and pure and genuine chivalry. Not 
so in the case of my young and chivalric friend! [let the proud and 
purulent Puritans raise a vulgar laugh and hereditary sneer at that 
word. Let them remember who killed their lawful sovereign, who in 



22 

secret prayed for them, while they cursed him and sought his life. Let 
them remember Cromwell and the storming of Drogheda where he 
ordered that nothing should be spared, nor man, nor woman, nor child 
"to save by this bitterness much effusion of blood, through the goodness 
of God," as he Puritanically said.] I compare, I contrast the case of the 
Chevalier Bayard, a practiced warrior, with that of my chivalric young 
friend, who, when the windows of Heaven were opened and pure water 
was distilled from the clouds on him and all the perishing passengers, 
neither would he drink, though dying of hunger and of thirst ! In a 
small fine white handkerchief he caught the pure water (not purer than 
was his soul] that was sent to quench his thirst and when saturated, he 
squeezed it and poured the contents upon the parched lips and in the 
blistered mouth of a dying matron or maiden ! This he continued to 
do and would not taste a drop himself! The purely selfish Yankey 
may say that he was crazy with thirst and that he ought to have 
quenched it to save his own life first. He was wild, no doubt, for want 
of food and drink, and this exalts his chivalric act [I love to use that 
word,] his chivalric act, I repeat of self-denial or even self-sacrifice; 
[if the Puritan prefers that word,] for, after the slight rain was over, he 
drank salt water, became mad, shouted aloud, leapt into the sea and 
was drowned ! Some of the boats reached the coast of South Carolina 
and gave the alarm. A steamer was sent from Charleston in search of 
the survivors and rescued them, and this was the story they told of the 
second friend of my departed youth, departed long since, at his death, 
never to return ! His beautiful form sank to rise no more, and his 
coral coated bones lie buried or scattered in some cave or cavern 
in the bottom of the sea where its tiny, industrious insect 
architects are laying the foundation, or raising the superstructure, 
perhaps, of some future, fortunate island. Shall his body rise no more, 
"never, never, never, forever?" No ! such is not the Christian faith, 
whose divine author said "thy brother shall rise again! Though he 
be dead, yet shall he live and he that believeth in me shall never die." 
I now give his pure spirit a heathen apotheosis [after the manner of an 
old Greek or Roman poet], and from his watery grave, I invoke it to 
arise! Go soul of chivalry ! mount to heaven, shoot upwards to the 
skies, [swift as a bright meteor leaving a long train of light behind it], 
and became a shining bright star, on the breast of the celestial Ameri- 
can eagle, with the brilliant one of our fellow townsman, w T ho went 
down with his ship, solitary and alone, rather than survive her loss ! 
Par nob He Fratrum! 

"The little white handkerchief" is worthy, in its turn, a suitable 



23 

apotheosis, and shall have it now, at once, and without delay. " Come 
hither my beautiful rover," once more come to my beck and call, my 
carrier pigeon ! Returned late from your celestial mission, whither 
you were sent to translate the golden ringlets of Berenece Gallatti 
[hapless maid of Scio !] to the " Corona Australis :" the "crown" that 
shines in the Southern heavens, between "Arcturus" and the Milky 
Way, [a starry belt fretted with solar systems, strewn like the dust of 
diamonds !] take now in your soft cooing bill, for another heavenly 
mission, the "little white handkerchief" which I gave you, [whiter 
than Chian mountain's driven snows], spread your fluttering pinions, 
bear it on wings swifter than love, and place it in the pure hands of 
Virgo, the constellation next the bright, translated swords of Jack- 
son and of Lee, which are crossed above the beam which supports 
the scales of Libra , there to remain until men shall cease to admire 
chaste and lovely woman and brave, gallant and chivalric actions ! — 
When the head of the great Radical serpent party shall have been 
smashed, when the 'lost cause ' of the South shall have been regained 
and all the states restored to their rights under a violated Constitution, 
let then the celestial Star Spangled Banner, [emblazoned with many 
new stars, and two bright unsheathed swords, [the swords of Jackson 
and of Lee], clutched in the claws of the thunder bearing bird of 
Jove, in place of its bolts of vivid, forked lightning], be taken from 
the skies and brought back to earth ! Let it then again be raised aloft, 
to float and flutter and open its ample folds, to every breeze and wind 
of heaven, from its new place, on the top of the stately pole, which 
rises above the capitol of Virginia and its beautiful dome, through 
which, the light of noonday is seen to pour its flood to illumine the re- 
splendent marble statue of her own Washington ! 

Puritans of the North ! learn from two shipwrecks, the difference 
between the Northern and Southern characters ! Between the New 
York captain and the chivalric Virginian. I love to repeat a word of 
quality, which you hate, because you have it not, and at which you 
yelp, as as a cur dog howls at music, which he hears, but does not 
understand. You have had your Benedict Arnold, the great traitor of 
modern times, who would have sold the savior of his country and the 
six New England States, especially, for thirty thousand peices of 
gold, who, for honorable promotion, with good pay, afterwards 
ravaged the coasts of Virginia and of Connecticut, his own 
native State. You have had your Aaron Burrs, your secret Hart- 
ford Convention of New England traitors, composed of your leading 
politicians, statesmen and profound lawyers, who would have 



24 

seceded [as they claimed they had a right to do, under or over the con- 
stitution,] and broken up the Union in the time of the Madison war: a 
war undertaken by a Virginia President, in defence of the national 
honor and "sailors' rights" violated, or insulted, in their impressment 
from on board one of our men-of-war off the Capes of Virginia; a State 
which had no sailors, New England having a hundred to her one. The 
Southern conventions for secession did not meet in secret, and in time 
of war, but openly and in time of profound peace, and did only what 
New England declared she herself had a right to do, and which the 
founders of the constitution and its ablest interpreters and her pro- 
f bundest jurists and constitutional lawyers had uniformly taught the 
South to be a soverign state's invaluable birth-right, and bulwark of 
defence with which she could not part, but with her existence. 

If you still say that Southern masters were inhuman, the slave oppress- 
ed and more miserable and wretched than freedom has made him; that 
the patriotic men and masses of the South, in the late barbarous and 
inhuman war of invasion, were foresworn, cowardly and treacherous, 
I say that you, Ben Butler, Ulysses Grant, and Horace Greeley, [the 
tail and two heads of Radical viper], lie in your hissing venemous 
tongue and teeth, and that you, yourselves, and your pack and crew 
are the real perjured traitors, and the confederates, both before and 
after the act, of rebellion, robbery, arson, rape and murder; and you 
may digest each and every one of these crimes and charges as best suit 
you. I hurl back at your heads, [in addition to these hard words and 
epithets which you are in the habit of using and applying to my coun- 
trymen], the names and actions, the bright names and noble actions of 
a Lee, a Jackson and a Herndon: the last so heroic in his death, the 
explorer, from its mouth to its source among the Ancles, of the mighty 
Amazon, the grandest river in the wide world, the source of the Gulf 
Stream and the great Fathers of all Rivers. Where now shall New 
England show their equals ? A Wilson, a Butler, a Sumner ! Faugh ! 
Their names pollute my pen and paper, they strike in the nostrils of 
even their own people, and of the whole nation, and their characters 
will be loathed by posterity, while the fame of Lee, Jackson, Herndon, 
and of a hundred other of their Virginia countrymen, will shine, more 
and more, and become brighter and brighter, as they go down the 
stream of time, and pale not their fires even near the blazing star of the 
Glory of Washington ! 

" Massachusetts needs no eulogy from me," said Webster, in or after 
defending the Hartford Convention. Let her now, like the mother 
of the Gracci, point to these, her trio of Traitors in Congress, and 



25 

exclaim, with all the pride she can feel, "These are my jewels !" Now, 
I ask you, Butler, Grant, Greeley, Sumner and Wilson, whether you, 
or either of you, has ever done, or expects to do, or is capable of doing 
anything like the heroic action of the four Virginians whom I have 
named, viz : Lee, Jackson, Herndon and Mc — ? my humble and youth- 
ful village friend ? You well know that these men were types (very 
fine ones, I admit,) of their countrymen, whose native land you made 
a battle-field, fighting yourselves in person, i. e., from a position of per- 
fect safety, sending forward and commandiug your drunken and mer- 
cinary troops, two to one, [had there but been no, or less odds !] to kill, 
burn and rob peaceful people, who said, as Abraham did to his brother 
Lot, "I pray you let there be no division or quarrel between us." — 
We and our servants, [that is, slaves,] will inhabit and cultivate our 
own fields, you and your hirelings, yours; or, if not having the cour. 
age to face the dangers of battle, cowardly staying at home, north of 
the Potomack, and wickedly blowing the flames of war, a fraternal war, 
and preaching rapine, rape, arson and murder with pens dipped in poi- 
son and aspic tongues! Better, far better had they been seared with a 
red hot Pennsylvania iron, before you set the Puritan on the cavalier, 
the whole North, with the whole power of the rebel government, on 
the weak and unassisted South ! An awful weight of responsibility 
rests upon your heads. I would not have it on mine ; no not for the 
solar system. You have not sheathed the sword, though you offered 
and we, in generous confidence, accepted, at Appomattox, the olive 
branch of peace. You still wage a cruel war upon twelve millions of 
people, and are trying to degrade men, like those I have mentioned 
(my humble self among the number) to the low level, political and 
social, of our former slaves, the slaves now of idleness and every vice 
of the negro nature. To you, and each of you, my curse is a wish that 
I lately expressed in a private letter to one of your number, "Before 
you die, may you see your daughters, if you have any whom you love, 
the mothers of mulatto children ; your sons, the fathers of bastard 
broods of the same hybred race ; and in your future world, (a world of 
your own making,) may you live for ages, and mix only, with negroes 
and mulattos !" I have done — but I have not yet made a beginning of 
you. 

Dated this 4th day of July, A. D., 1872. 

Note: — The expression in page 19, of this Tableau, "rides on the whirlwind 
and directs the storm" is borrowed from Addison's campaign, and was pronounced 
by Mr. Thackery, in his lecture upon the writings of that author, to be the finest 
thoughts in his "Gazette in Rhyme." Addison borrowed it from the "Phoinissi" 

4 



26 

of the great. Greek tragedian, Euripides, and improved the expression, but not the 
idea. The Duke of Marlborough riding astride the whirlwind and directing the 
storm, is to ray mind a conceit, in bad taste, not to call it profane. The thought is 
scriptural, and old Sternhold, in his version of the Divine Harpist, speaking of the 
Almighty, says "The Lord descended from on high, most gloriously he rode," &c. 
I quote from memory and recollect that Mr. Jefferson refers to this passage with 
great admiration. Had I thought its sublimity suitable to a mortal, I would have 
applied it to Stonewall Jackson, that thunderbolt of war, and not to the destroying 
angel, which I make an agent of divine vengeance. When we recollect the char- 
acter of that great military hero, Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, how he was 
admired and supplied with money by an infamous titled woman of a corrupt court, 
(starting in life as a male prostitute), how his commission was bought with the 
price of his sister's virtue, how he was henpecked by a domestic scold and terma- 
gent of a wife, how he treacherously followed the popular breeze and abandoned his 
king, James the Second, while holding his commission and commanding his guard 
and was finally driven from court by the Queen Bee of Great Britain, with contempt 
and in company with his vixen Dutchess to the shades, luxuries and licentious galle- 
ries of Blenheim; when one recollects these and other passages in his life of continual 
warfare; foreign and domestic, he forgets the victories of the mercenary, blood-stained 
hero, and thinks the famous passage in Addison, inflated, hyperbolical and most un- 
suitable and untrue. The Greek reader will find the passage which the classical 
scholar Addison had in his eye, in page 124, lines 211, 212 and 213 of the Phoene- 
cians. They are chanted by the chorus, which a few lines above, sings of the 
heights of the stormy or snowy Parnassus. Byron's beautiful thought of an eagle 
pierced in the breast by an arrow feathered from its own wing, which he applies so 
felicitously to Kirk White (whose tomb I visited at Cambridge) is taken verbatim 
and literatim from Aeschylus, the oldest and most sublime of the Greek tragedians, 
Persai page 123. These two instances may serve to show the value of the study of 
Grecian literature. An adroit writer may appropriate and improve or decorate 
himself with foreign ornaments, (diamonds and rubies), and shine in borrowed 
light without being suspected by any one but some fellow antiquarian, some A. S. S. 
The same lines of Aeschylus and Euripides are referred to in the English — Greek 
lexicon of the learned Liddel and Scott, late student and fellow of Christ Church 
and Balliol College, Oxford, England, edited by Henry Drisler, L. L. D., professor 
of Greek and Latin in Columbia College, New York, and printed (pirated ?) by 
Harper and Brothers, of the City of Gotham. It contains not a few errors in 
orthograhpy, that is to say correct spelling, in punctuation, and in the references to 
the writers whom I verified; which I discovered in the perusal of the ponderous 
tome of nearly 1,776 pages, and marked as I went along. The above may serve as 
a specimen of a Virginia farmer's annotations. 



TABLEAU, No. 21. 



Decoration of the Grave of the Confederate Officer's Widow, 



I had been at my usual studies all day long and, at its close, I walked 
forth to stretch my cramped limbs and breathe the pure breath of the 
mountain air, as was my wont. I ascended the heights in the western 
suburbs, above the town and pausing, stood, resting my folded arms on 
the crumbling walls of the cemetery, to behold, for the hundredth time, 
the sun go down the lofty peaks of Otter and, like a dying dolphin, 
painting the fleecy clouds with every tint and shade of the rainbow's 
hue. By these two, tall cone shaped twin mountains, I marked, as by 
the gnomon of a dial, the sun's annual and daily progress in the Eclyp- 
tic. While leaning over the wall and deciphering the worn inscrip- 
tion on an old moss-grown sandstone slab near me, "where some fore- 
father of the village slept," I heard, a little to my right, the voices of 
children talking and whom, at first, I supposed to be at play. Raising 
my head and turning my eyes the way whence the sound came, I saw, 
at a short distance and grouped about a new made grave, a boy and a 
girl, (not yet in their teens,) an old grey headed negro and a colored 
nurse, somewhat his junior, who was standing near a child's carriage or 
wagon, and talking to its occupant (a little girl two or three years old) 
in the language used by all mothers, I believe, white, black, red, cop- 
per, &c, throughout the world, and known as "baby -talk." The old 
negro man had brought from the common near at hand, (which I had 
crossed in my walk up hill,) a wheelbarrow load of green, grass sod, 
(enameled with the earliest and tinyest grassy flowers of spring,) which 
he was laying on the sides of the "heaving grave," aptly fitting with 
his hands and striking with the back of his shovel to make it lie smooth 
and level. The boy was busy planting at the foot, or west end of the 
grave, the scion or shoot (which the old man had dug up for him) of a 
wild rose bush, or eglantine, growing at a little distance and covering, 
with its bending branches, a slab tomb stone, green with mould, or some 
kind of moss. The girl was planting among the sod a few bulbous 
roots, with a bunch or two of snow drops and daises. On a pure white 
Italian marble head stone, hung a wreath of artificial flowers, small 



28 

white rose buds or orange blossoms, some remnant, perhaps, of the 
mother's well kept bridal attire. I watched the group in silence, with- 
out stirring or being seen by it. The children, (brother and sister) it 
was plain to iny eye the at first glance, were decorating their mother's 
grave; for I at once recognised old Scipio Africanus and the nurse, his 
wife who had held the infant in her arms, when the grave of the Con- 
federate officer was decorated the year before. He and his frail widow, 
then tottering on the brink of the grave, "now slept well, ' like the 
murdered Duncan, "life's fitful dream ended," reposing side by side. 
"The storm was o'er and they at rest." Fair and gentle reader, "grieve 
no more for them." The children were clad iu cheap, half mourning. 
On the boy's straw hat (too cool for the season) was a broad band of 
black ribbon, for full mourning. On his little sister's dark chip bon- 
net, ribbon ties and knots of the same color. The infant was dressed in 
pure white, its short sleeves being tied, also, with narrow black ribbon. 
All three were decent, though their clothing showed poverty. The boy 
and girl had, no doubt, too often visited these two graves now to weep, 
and the negroes (like myself) were too old to shed a tear, even a salt 
and bitter one. Their work of filial piety ended, the brother and sister 
put on their little hat and bonnet (the one had been laid on a tomb 
stone, the other hung on a branch of the thorn or Chrokee plum bush, 
growing near,; and, turning, left :he spot, followed by Scipio and his 
wife. The nurse drew the carriage, or little wooden wagon, of the 
baby and turned and stopt and talked to it as she went along, to com- 
fort the child, for it had begun to cry for its mother, and said in broken 
speech and sobs, "Oh. mammy! when do you aad Uncle Scipio think 
mama will come home from Heaven? I'se so tired of waiting! Why 
does she stay away so long ? Will she ever come back to see me?" 
Poor child, it did not understand its loss, how much soever she felt it ! 

Parentes morent, ut Philomela rioctnrna dulces nidos flevit, 

They weep their parents dear and dead 
Like Philomel, the live long night, 

Her young lost brood. 

Old Scipio followed, bending under the weight of years, rolling his 
sideless wheelbarrow, across whose bottom he had "laid down the shovel 
and the hoe." There is "no more work for him now," for since then, 
'he has gone where the good negroes go !" and shall, too, have an 
apotheoris from my j>en in due season. A greyhound was running 
before the departing group and the old Newfoundland dog Sancho, 
(now in his teens and tottering with age, like his master,) slowly brought 
up the rear. I followed them with my eyes until they had passed 



29 

through the front gate, between the honey locust trees, and when they 
were gone and out of sight, I clambered over the crumbling brick wall, 
"approached and read" the inscription on the head stone of the mother's 
grave : 

HOPE, FAITH AND CHARITY. 

Then followed the name, the date of birth and death, the age in 
years, months and days, and the name of the deceased husband. The 
verses quoted were, "Unless ye become as little children ye can in no 
wise enter my Father's kingdom." "I am the resurrection and the 
life." I give the words of the inscription as nearly as I can, and the 
sense exactly. Musing, I thought of the diamond engagement and the 
marriage ring of massive California gold. Were they in pledge and 
forfeited for one-fourth their value at a pawn broker's shop, or had they 
gone to eke out the orphans' clothing, to pay for the black walnut or 
mahogany coffin, the shroud, the silver plate for the name, the black 
gloves, the carriages, the herse with nodding black plumes, the price 
and digging of the grave? The sun has now gone to his night's rest, 
sinking in splendor (giving token of a glorious rising) behind the lofty 
peaks of Otter, one of which flung its cone shaped shadow, eclypsing 
the Valley of the Shadow of Death, (as the moon does the sun) and pro- 
jected its apex half way to the spot, on which I stood alone in the 
City of Silence. The din of the City of Life and Strife, below my feet, 
now rose upon my ear. Hundreds of glittering lamps at once flashed 
and flamed into light, like a "little patch" of the starry firmament, 
brought down to dim earth. I wended my way slowly back to my 
study and chamber and read great Horner's story of Troy taken and 
destroyed by the wooden horse of the wily Ulysses, dedicated to Min- 
erva. "Farewell; a long farewell" to the faithful husband and the true 
and loving wife. No more will they appear upon the scene. They 
fought the battle of life and their earthly troubles are over. Reader, 
curiously enquire no further about them. 

"Their names, their lineage, it matters not, 
To whom related or by whom begot." 



TABLEAU, No. 22. 



IHE CONFEDERATE OFFICER'S GRAVE REVISITED. 

Oh ! Mea anima propheta ! — Cicero. 
Oh ! my too prophetic soul. — Hamlet. 

Taking my usual morning walk, I ascended the heights, west of the 
toAvn, to see the rising sun gild the summit of the peaks of Otter with its 
earliest rays, and strolled into the grave yard that crowned the hill, to 
meditate an hour before breakfast among the tombs and scent "the in- 
cense breathing morn." The smell of the earth is good for the lungs, 
as thoughts of mortality are for the soul, says some old English writer. 
As I went along, I gathered a few wild roses, sprinkled with dew, from 
the branches of an untrimmed bush that hung over the iron railing en- 
closing a grave, and took my slow course, step by step, to the north- 
west angle, (the Confederate burying ground,) my favorite resort, 
whence, seated upon a sand tomb stone, I enjoyed a view of the bold 
and sweeping outline of the Blue Mountains in the distant horizon, 
running and sinking towards the North, and of the rich plains and roll- 
ing pastures, and waving corn fields, and blooming orchards, and green 
woodlands and ancient forests, (a much finer view, in my opinion, than 
the far-famed one from Richmond Hill, near London), lying at my feet, 
and stretching as far as the eye could follow them to the west. Not 
far from me were the graves of the Confederate officer and his widow, 
which I had often visited. Seated, by myself, I cpiietly watched a 
couple of sparrows building their nest in a cedar bush, and a pair of 
wrens, with straws, the stems of leaves and small twigs in their bills, 
flying in and out the hollow of a wild cherry tree, caused by cutting off 
a branch too far from the body, which had rotted and decayed back 
into the trunk. They eyed me very curiously, peering at me from their 
hole and turning their little heads sideways to peep at me. I recollect 
once, when seated in the portico of my country house, (on the pillars 
and capitals of which I used to hang up and place small boxes, or 
houses, of potters earth for this sweet little songster to build in and 
"wake me with its early song.") I remember watching a male and 



31 

female at their work, busily preparing for the advent of their little 
family circle. One of the pair had just made its deposit of a feather 
lor the inside lining of the nest. The moment it flew away, I arose, 
took down the small box and placed it under the rustic seat on which 
I sat. The next instant the other bird returned with some building 
material in its bill and, finding its home removed, dropped its burden, 
raised a cry and flew away in haste. I at once replaced the box and 
took my seat, quietly awaiting the result, when back came both birds 
to see the ruin that had been wrought. I shall never forget my amuse- 
ment. The male seemed to reproach his mate for the false alarm she 
had given him. They scrutinised the half built nest, remained, looking 
at me and the box for a few moments, and then flew away and never 
revisited it. Have birds any means of communicating their thoughts ? 
Here, it seems, was a plain case, unless cries of pain, fear, grief, joy, love 
&c, may suffice. Have they a language of their own and does each 
kind, like nations, have a different one ? Do birds of the same sort and 
feather in different countries speak the same tongue or only a dialect ? 
If so, how many a language must the feathered tribe use throughout the 
world, and is its philosophy like that of human speech ? Have they 
abstract terms, such as liberty, slavery, virtue, vice, &c. Have they a 
decalogue, and are they forbidden to murder and rob their own species 
destroy their nests and young ones, or are they restrained only by blind 
instinct, and, not as human beings are, by the light of reason ? These 
questions I leave to the political preachers and ulcerated theologians of 
the North, Beecher, of Brooklin, Bacon, of Connecticut, & Co. I arose 
from my seat among the tombs to depart, but just stept aside to revisit 
the graves of the Confederate officer and his widow. Now, alas ! there 
was another, and a very small grave by the side of its mother ! Their 
bodies were mouldering together into dust. Their spirits returned to 
God who gave them, and were happily reunited in Heaven ! This little 
gra.ve had, likewise, been sodded by some pious hand. A few white 
and yellow primroses and cowslips were blooming on its sides. A crocus 
and a double hyacinth were coming into bloom near its head, at which 
>vas planted a wooden cross, painted white, with the words, "Our little 
sister,' in black letters. On it was hung a small wreath of withered 
flowers, and at its base were arranged several child's toys, much worn 
in use, a small tin trumpet and a girl doll, neatly dressed, wrapped in 
a shawl of red cloth and in mourning, were among the offerings laid 
upon the grave. I scattered my wild roses between the grave of the 
child and its mother, turned away from the spot, sick at heart, and 
was about to retire by the front gate, as I had entered, but hearing the 



32 

voices of some young persons approaching, talking .and laughing, (who 
had come a Maying and were gathering snow balls, white and purple 
lilacs and the bloom of the hawthorn, ) I leapt over the northern wall 
and came back to my room, by another and a longer route, full of sad 
and bitter thoughts and with no appetite for my food. Upon enquiring 
I learnt that the child could not get over the loss of its mother, for 
whom it continued to cry during its illness. Complaining it pined 
away, growing weaker daily, refusing medicine and food, until one lit- 
tle month put an end to its earthly sufferings and sorrows, and restored 
it to the arms and leaping heart of its fond parents. The young doctor 
reported the death as caused by cerebro-spinal meningetis, but the 
negro nurse or mammy said it died from grief at the loss of its mother, 
a thing which sometimes happens. A large portion of the human 
race die in infancy, as trees shed a great part of their unripe fruit, 
nipped belike by a killing frost or visited by the winds of Heaven too 
rudely. Is this a law of nature or does it come from the ignorance and 
neglect of parents, and are the survivors any the better for it? Did 
the parent of all excite the people of the North and raise up champions 
"his chosen instruments," to rob and murder their brethren of the 
South as some of their preachers teach them ? Hear me, ye men of the 
North and women too ! the day approaches and is not far distant when, 
in the course of nature, every one of you who took an active part 
against the South, aud your consciences, will be called before the tribu- 
nal of your Maker, to give an account of all your deeds done in the 
flesh, I would not now be in the place of some of you for the whole 
world, nay, for any number of worlds. I would much prefer instant 
annihilation ! I revisit no more the graves of the husband, the wife 
and the child, three of your victims in one small family ! 

"There they alike in trembling hope repose, 
The bosom of their father and their God !" 

Mav 2 and 3, 1872. Battle of Chancellorsville. 



Norfolk, June 21, 1872. 

Franklin B. Dexter, Esq., Secretary, etc., 

Sir— I have just received your circular, enclosing me the biauk 
form of a proxy to vote, on the 10th day of July, for six members of 
the corporation of Yale College, and return it to you unexecuted. I now 
decline to vote. The graduates nominated for election are unknown 
to me, except Gratz Brown, Esq., of Missouri, a Radical candidate for 
the Vice-Presidency, and Lewis B. Woodruff, L. L. D., (if my graduat- 
ing .lass of 1830, whom I remember as a person of no natural ability 
and little scholarship, with manners on a par with the New England 
youth of his day. You do not present one name from the Southern 
States, where, to my knowledge, there were more good scholars, from 
John C. Calhoun down to my humble self, in proportion to their num- 
bers and, perhaps, absolutely, than from the whole of New England. I 
have long since ceased to feel the slightest interest in, or regard for. the 
college at New Haven, whose senile professor of chemistry and intole- 
rant, ulcerated, calvanistic theological school, on the text of "servants," 
that is slaves, "obey your masters," preached abolition, as a matter of 
conscience and a higher law for a crusade against the slave States ; and 
whose graduates, for the greater part, stirred up the fanatic and pusi- 
lanimous barbarians of the North to make a foray, on a vast scale, upon 
the South for the sake of plunder and to murder its refined and vir- 
tuous people, burn their houses, set free their slaves, incite them to kill 
their kind masters and massacre their families, returning home with 
much booty and stolen goods, (the spoils of war as they called them) 
having surpassed in barbarism and cruelty the hordes of the Northmen 
who overran Italy and sacked Rome, as your countrymen did Rich- 
mond, the Capital of my native State. I abhor your people and their 
institutions, which "soften not the manners," (as letters are said to do) 
but make them ferocious and what they are ; and I am sure, under 
Providence, that the day is not far distant when they will be visited in 

some signal manner, by divine wrath. Conflagrations, pestilence, domes- 
5 



tic disorders, the daily atrocious crimes committed in your corrupt 
cities, and shocks of the earth to give you warning, presage to my mind 
that the day of retribution draweth nigh, when woe ! to New England, 
woe! I desire that you will read this letter at the meeting of the 
alumni of Yale College, on the 10th, (the day for the meeting of the 
Baltimore Convention, it should have been instead thereof, the 4th day 
of July) that they may know the feeling at the South, or, at least, the 
sentiments of one man, who is not afraid to express them. 

I am, Sir, 

Your obedient Servant, 

JOHN M. GORDON. 



Norfolk, Virginia, July 4th, A. D. 1872, 

And of Independence 

To the 

Regents, Professors and Fellows 
of th e 

Infidel University of Cambridge : 

Nearly one hundred years ago, my countryman, General George 
Washington (nominated to that high post of honor, with its great 
duties, by your Federalist John Adams, and elected by the voice of 
the whole nation,) first drew his bright sword in the cause of the thir- 
teen colonies, under an ancient Elm tree in Cambridge Common, to 
which his countrymen make, or did make pilgrimages, and which I 
have often visited. He went thither at the cry of Massachusetts, the 
Bay State, to drive the British Lion from Boston, and his first achieve- 
ment was to recover, from the possession of a powerful enemy, the 
Capital of your State. 

You have lately added to the classico-scriptural name of Hiram 
Ulysses Grant, Esq., [erst, a lazy, leather dresser,] the honorable and 
learned title or epithet of L. L. D., doctor utriusque legis, of civil and 
ecclesiastical law. What does he know about either of these difficult 
sciences, a moderate knowledge of which it requires a life time to ac- 



35 

quire? Docs he know the definition and meaning of the word law? 
Can he repeat the decalogue, the ten commandments, in or out of their 

order from memory ? I say nothing here about his mode and hain't of 
keeping them. What, I ask you again, does he know of civil law, or 
the laws of the land? Did he ever read Coke or Blackstone ? Are 
these text books at the military academy of West Point, where he was 
imperfectly educated? Did he read Kent or Story or even Rawle on 
the constitution there, or in camp, smoking his segar and drinking his 
brandy and water, or afterwards, in his occupation and business of cur- 
rying stinking hides and dealing in leather, to which, the proverb says 
and you seem to think, there is nothing in the whole world equal. You 
have given the high title and degree of L. L. D. to him who is ignorant 
and regardless of all law ! The great writ of habeas corpus, the sheet 
anchor of the constitution, of the ship of State, and the bulwark of civil 
liberty and of every civil right, he has induced a servile Congress to 
suspend in Carolina [of chivalric fame,] and his myrmidon judges and 
packed juries, upon the testimony of negro freedmen, have tried and 
condemned its innocent and aged citizens, who have been torn from their 
families, transported from their native land and incarcerated in the 
felon's prison of the rebel government [it should be torn or burnt down] 
at Albany, the corrupt Capital of New York, whose politicians, legis- 
lators and judges are the most corrupt even in the present Union of 
fraud and force? The high and honorable title ofL. L. D. conferred 
on him, who knows not the elements, the ABC of law and of the 
constitution, which he has sworn to support, and evinces, on all occa- 
sions, a contempt for it and for the rights of the whole people and of 
the States, thereby guaranteed! Whose administration is confessed 
and charged by his old friends and followers, Sumner, Greeley, Gratz 
& Co., to be the most extravagant and corrupt with which the country 
has ever been cursed ; not even excepting that of the dead infidel doo- 
Lincoln, who, his biographer, friend and eulogist Lamon says, had no 
religious opinions or principles of any kind. Has the creature Grant 
a particle of either, whose private life is stained with every low, vulgar 
and corrupting vice ? A political bull dog and blood hound of war, 
wdio love to lap human gore, who headed the army of the rebel gov- 
ernment, made Virginia a battle-field, burnt and pillaged its Capital, 
(why were the statues of the father of his country, walled in and sur- 
rounded by a cordon of his great fellow statesmen, not defaced or stolen 
and carried away for the value of the bronze, like silver spoons and 
family plate, or the relics of the sage of Mount Vernon, which with his 
sword were stolen from Arlington House by rebel officers and merci- 



36 

nary soldiers,] ravaged and desolated "the ancient Dominion," plun- 
dered and murdered her innocent people, refused, contrary to the laws 
of civilized or Christian warfare, to exchange prisoners, lest the bands 
of the enemy might be strengthened, and would not permit even physic- 
to be sent South for the use and relief of the officers and soldiers of his 
own army taken captive, languishing, suffering, dying in the crowded 
prisons and hospitals, overflowing with Northern prisoners ! With the 
aid of a mercenary host, with the whole power of the rebel government 
at Washington and the superior wealth and population of the North, 
[ten dollars and three men to one, oh, the ignominy of it!] he succeeded 
in crushing, by brute force and brutish ferocity, the Southern States, 
which were nearly without resources, her brave soldiers in want of food 
and clothing, surgeons and medicine, without munitions of war, domes- 
tic friends, [her slaves were set free and urged to assassinate their kind 
masters] without foreign aid or any allies and with the prejudices [fos- 
tered by Yankey politicians, public newspapers, full of stereotyped lies 
and libels, and by the preachings of Puritan parsons] and with the un- 
enlightened sympathy of the whole world against them ! Oh, the fear- 
ful odds, and ah : " The pity of it, Iago, the pity of it." I sometimes 
doubt the evidences of my senses, that such a war was possible, and 
deem the things I saw and heard but a dream. Your illustrious com- 
mencement dinner Guest, dumb orator and honorable and learned 
L. L. D. ( he has not law and latin enough to know the meaning of those 
three to him mystic letters, nor sense enough to refuse a title which 
even Governor Sancho Panza would have rejected,) your Conquering 
Hero promised us peace at Appomattox, and is still, ever and anon, 
crying out " let us have peace," by which he means, let me continue to 
have my own way, and let bygones, now and hereafter, be bygones. — 
He held out to the shattered army of the Confederate South the olive 
branch in one hand, while, with the other, he grasped a drawm sword 
concealed behind him ! He has not sheathed that treacherous sword, 
but has thrown away the scabbard and continues to wage against us, 
the most cruel and unrelenting war. He would, like your malignant 
Senators Sumner and Wilson [the latter an original cobbler and aboli- 
tionist, and therefore, worthy your L. L. D.,] degrade us Southern gen- 
tlemen (whom he still admires and envies in the bottom of 'his heart,) 
to the political level of himself, and a social equality with the ignorant 
and vicious negro freedman, whom he sends to succeed himself as a cadet 
at West Point, to keep company with his own son and the sons of other 
white men and of gentlemen, and whom he invites to his table to set 
beside his wife and daughter in the Presidential mansion, once graced 



37 

by Lady Washington and by Mrs. Madison ! But, "ehue jam satis !" 
Are the above some of the qualities, virtues, vices and accomplishments 
for which an ignoble military Hero deserves your admiration and re- 
ceived your approval and applause by having your L. L.D. affixed 
and tied to his euphonious name? or was it, ' virtute officii,' because 
he accidently is now the President of theUnited States, and visited that 
Humbug, the Boston Peace Jubilee, that you solemnly declare him to 
be a profound jurist, and chiefly versed, beyond his fellows and boon 
companions in civil, ecclesiastical and constitutional law : him, whom 
you know to be totally and entirely ignorant of all lavs, public or pri- 
vate, except it be the lavs of the card table and race course, [with its 
sweat cloth and Faro Bank,] brag, whist, odd trick, euchre, keno, — 
vingt-et-un, &c, and the laws which regulates the rise and fall of 
Senaca sandstone stock, and of Gold and Silver, viz; the demand and 
supply thereof. If you have endorsed and labeled him with the three 
letters L. L. D., because he, for a short term, occupies the " White 
House," why did you not for the same reason offer your highest honor 
to all the Presidents of all sorts, from General Grant up to General 
Washington ? 

Your learned body set a precedent, it is true, by conferring it upon 
Jackson, the violent and vulgar Hero of one battle, fought in perfect 
safety behind cotton bales, at New Orleans, where that article was at 
hand, in abundance, nearly in the right place and could not be over- 
looked; just as the battle of Bunker Hill, (crowned now with a boastful 
monument of Quincy Granite, of which name, Josias, your former 
President was an open advocate for secession,) was fought in a deep 
ditch, with a good tough oaken fence for a breastwork, to your soldiers 
almost equal to a stonewall. This degree of L. L. D. your corporate 
body conferred on Andrew (not Stonewall) Jackson, when he visited 
Boston on an electioneering tour through New England, and while 
there, if my memory serves me, grossly violated the laws of the United 
States and his oath of office, by issuing an order for the removal of the 
public money on deposit in the Bank of the United States, for which 
high-handed act and public outrage the virtuous Senate of that day 
(Webster among the rest) condemned him by a vote of censure. 

The conferring of the degree of L. L. D., (two liquids and one mute) 
upon the Hero of New Orleans, had an infinitesimal portion of sense 
and reason in it. For that military President had read law for a few 
months, practised his profession and had been appointed an inferior 
Judge out somewhere West. He was said once to have descended from 
the bench in his judicial robes to arrest some Western bravo or bully, 



38 

who resisted his bumbaliff, for which I give him all due praise. "Ce- 
dant arma togse," as Tully said of his consulship. But, I well remember 
that the Harvard degree of learned doctor of civil and ecclesiastical 
laws to a President, the darling, at that time, of degenerate Democrats 
excited the derision of the public press, [it is silent now] and covered 
the College with the contempt even of the citizens of Cambridge and of 
Boston, the capital of the State. Many of its present professors, or 
some of them, are old enough to remember the conferring of that pre- 
posterous and ill becoming honor on a mere military President, and 
should have been careful not to follow so bad a precedent. Perhaps, 
after all, the degree of learned Doctor of both Laws was added to the 
now historic name of Hiram Ulysses Grant, because that blood-stained 
hero had a son in the senior class at Cambridge, or because he honored 
with his presence " the Peace Jubilee," in which Harvard University 
may have taken stock. It was a grand occasion and a grand exhibition, 
that Gilmor Peace Jubilee job, in which twenty thousand Yankey 
voices, accompanied by ten thousand jarring and discordant instru- 
ments, played and sang the praise of Peace and Harmony to an enrap- 
tured Puritan audience of forty thousand men, women, children and 
negroes, [tickets $5, children and negroes half price,] intoning, I say, 
the Marsaillese hymn, the grand war song of the French Nation, sung 
by her sans-cullotte rabble, to the movement of the head-chopping bloody 
Guillotin — the Star Spangled Banner and Yankey Doodle, (breaking 
and running into double and counter fvge, with impromptu variations, 
as performed on the life and kettle drum, at Fredericksburg and Ma- 
nassas or Bull Run, on the 18 — 21 hot days of July A. D. 1861, and 

of Independence ), Hail Columbia, happy Land, God Save the 

Queen, the great Hymn of Great Britain, which that nation and the 
world knows by heart, sung throughout an empire on which the sun 
never does, and as I hope never will set ! " Quod faustum, felixquesit." 
Last and not least, even in the estimation of a Northern audience, 
(Grant himself being a listener,) the South's national air of Dixie, to 
the tune of whose spirit-stirring notes Lee and Jackson marched to 
Battle and from Victory to Victory! That song of the Sunny South, 
(once sung bv the slaves,) with whose quick time the Confederate le- 
gions kept pace, as they moved on with firm hearts and unblenehing 
eye to meet an enemy three to their one, drove back, put to flight and 
scattered them, like chaff before the wind ! At some future day it> will 
be intoned by millions of voices, happy and harmonious in heart and 
mind ! Oh, my countrymen ! do not easily let that simple air die, for 
it is associated with the glories of the past and the hopes of the future ! 



39 

Now out upon you, Professors and Fellows of Cambridge, Massachu- 
setts, you degrade yourselves, your University, and the Science of 
learning you undertake to teach ! In conferring the title and degree 
of L. L. D. on General or President Grant, you have incurred the con- 
tempt of every man of letters, and your servility justly merits, and 
certainly will excite, the scorn of every manly breast and virtuous 
mind. Macte virtute! Go on in the course you have begun, ye teachers 
of Youth, iu the Republic of Letters, and, at your next annual Com- 
mencement confer on your darling Hero the title of L. M. D., Doctor 
of Martial Law, (he having quashed the writ of Habeas Corpus, and 
the Constitution with it,) or, have a lengthy ode, in imitation of one 
of Horace's "Qualem ministrem fulminis alitem," for instance, com- 
posed by your college poet and eulogist of Nat Turner, (the insurrec- 
tionist and black assassin of his old masterand mistress, whom he killed 
with a broad axe while sleeping in bed side by side, ) by your professor 
of Belle lettre, who sucked science from the breast of two alma maters, 

" Cambridge and the U 
niversity of Gottingin," 

Longfellow, I mean, and confer on Greeley instead of Grant ( whose star 
is on the wane, and Horace's in the ascendant,) the enigmatical and 
equivocal title and degree of A. S. S., so that, like Dogberry in the play 
he may exclaim, Oh ! that some one were here to write me down an ass ! 
The same with a third S added would serve your future senator and suc- 
cessor of your graduate and great man Sumner, viz: Benjamin Franklin, 
or the beast Ben Butler; as simple-minded people South would think you 
only meant thereby a stolen silver spoon. I have addressed you in the be- 
ginning of this letter as professors and fellows of an infidel university; 
such is your reputation in the South, and for this reason, more than forty 
years ago, my parents preferred to send me to Yale College, (where I 
and four or five members of my family were educated,) which seat of 
learning, though of the calvanistic, is still of the Christian faith. You 
profess to believe that Christianity is not of divine origin, and that the 
Savior was a man like yourself, and your senators in Congress and rep- 
resentatives too, Butler & Co., say that there is a higher law than the 
Scripture, which they condemn for sanctioning slavery (rejecting such 
texts as servants (douloi) that is. slaves, obey your masters; Paul's 
treatment of a runaway or fugitive, white, Christian slave, sending him 
back to his master, etc., ) and that there is a higher obligation on their 
conscience than their oath to support the constitution, which, accord- 
ingly, they habitually and without scruple [violate and wrest to suit 
themselves and the interests of their constituents. Hence it is that I 



40 

have had but little respect for your university, and since the Grant de- 
gree of L. L. D., and the compliments paid him at your commencement, 
(to which, from their extravagance, he was unable to reply, and had to 
call on his political friend, ex- Attorney-General Hoar, to answer for 
him in another string of compliments,) since that fiasco of a dinner, I 
entertain for your corporate body less respect than ever, as the whole 
tenor of this letter shows. I am a Virginian born and bred, proud of 
my native State, her seats of learning, in which Lee, Jackson and Maury 
have lately figured, of her University [which never has and never will, I 
am sure, prostitute its honors as you have yours,] and doubly proud now 
of the actions and the fame of her great men and dead heroes. "Quis 
finis et modus," &c. This letter may serve to show your body the tem- 
per and character of Southern gentlemen, and, not wishing to conceal 
my name, I now subscribe it in full for your satisfaction, but will not 
say that I am, 

Respectfully, your obedient servant, 

JOHN M. GORDON. 



Criticism on Gray's Eiegy in a Country Churchyar 



Thursday. April 18, 1872. 



"The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day, 

The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea, 
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way 
t And leaves the world to darkness and to me." 

A better reading of the first line, and more solemn, would be : 

The Curfew tolls ! The Knell of parting day ! 

The Curfew was an evening peal, by which the Conqueror willed that 
every man should rake up his fire and put out his light ; so that in 
many places, at this day, says Cowell, where a bell is customarily rung 
towards bed time, it is said to ring Curfew. Gray was called by one 
of his admirers, " perhaps the most learned man in Europe," and his 
elegy in a church yard is one of the most favorite productions of the 
British muse. Historically speaking, the Curfew was not the knell of 



41 

parting day, but a signal for bed time. Cattle come home and chickens 
go to roost at sunset. Wind is to turn round, or proceed in curve or 
bending lines. This cattle rarely do, as every farmer knows. They 
come straight home. All domestic animals prefer to move in a straight 
line, which is the shortest between any two points. To plod is to toil, 
or nioii, or travel slow and laboriously. The husbandman is painted, 
in this line, as walking homeward, whereas he usually rides on the 
back of his weary horse. Ploughman plods and weary way, are written 
for the sake of alliteration, whereas wends his weary way, would have 
been as well and truer to nature — 

"And leaves llie world to darkness and to me." 

What becomes of soft, silvery twilight, prolonged in England till 
past bed time? Is it dark in the academic shades of Cambridge at sun 
set? And in what sense can the whole world be said to be left, at that 
soft hour, to darkness and the poet, alone of mankind? Was not every 
eye, that had a taste for the beautiful enjoying the parting day and the 
approach of night with its evening and sweet repose ? The evening 
bells or chimes of Cambridge, if she has them, are doubtless very beau- 
tiful and their melancholy music "accords with the soul's sadness." 
They should have been named and put into the picture, instead of the 
unpoetical "Curfew," which is historically out of place. This first 
stanza is inaccurate and obscure. 

"Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, 

And all the air a solemn stillness holds, 
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, 
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds." 

The author had just said the world was left to darkness and himself. 
He now introduces twilight, which preceeds and does not usually fol- 
low darkness in the United States, at least, unless the light may besaid 
metaphorically, "about to break in upon the unhappy country." 
" And all the air a solemn stillness holds." 

What becomes of the noises that arise at sunset or candlelight? the 
din of busy cities, the cheerful sounds about farm yards, the evening 
songs of the farmer and his wife or dairy maid, the village school dis- 
missed for the day, the shouting and laughter of boys and girls, which 
attend twilight ? 

"Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight." 

Shakspeare has "shard-borne beetle ;" which, some of his commenta- 
tors say, delights in dung hills and answers to the common Virginia 
tumble bug. Is this the only variety of English bug that comes forth 
6 



42 

at sun down, and are there none that sing and chirp during twilight 
when the birds have done their vesper hymn ? The cricket by the 
hearth is mentioned by Goldsmith, the naturalist, and by Dickens or 
Boz, the novelist, favorably. To what kind of beetle does the poet 
allude? Not I hope to the scarabteus typhoeus, or common tumble- 
bug, which takes wing at sun set and "homeward flies." 

" And drowsy (.inklings lull the distant fold." 

It is the drowsy cattle that make their bells to tinkle, and not the 
drowsy tinklings that lull the distant folds. When cattle lie down in 
the evening they begin to chew the cud, and are, of course, wideawake. 
They shut their eyes with pleasure and do not then nod or sleep. 

'' Save that, from yonder ivy-mantled tower. 
The moping owl doth to the moon complain, 

Of such as wandering near the secret bower, 
Disturb her ancient solitary reign." 

Moping should be screeching or hooting owl. The owl does not mope 
at night, but during the day, when the sun's rays dazzle its eyes. It 
is made to see in the dark when it is wide awake in search of its prey. 
Why complain to the moon ? The moon is not always visible, or above 
the horizon, especially at twilight. Silent bower is put in, not to make 
sense, but to rhyme with ivy-mantled tower, which cannot, with any 
propriety or regard to the meaning of the word, be called bower. Owls 
in this country, where ivy-mantled towers do not abound, sit amid the 
bnmches of trees and when approached, however stealthily, cease to 
hoot. English owls may complain to the moon, of such as molest their 
ancient solitary reign. Why the reign of the owl is ancient and soli- 
dary, especially, or more so, than the whippowill, a bird of ill omen, or 
the nightingale, of England, does not appear. Both of these birds are 
fond of a secret bower overrun with roses and honeysuckles, which is 
what we mean by that word in this country. 

" Beneath those rugged elms, that yew tree's shade, 
Where heaves the turf in many a moulding heap, 

Each in his narrow cell forever laid, 

The rude forefather of the hamlet sleep." 

The English elm, as it is called in Virginia, is one of thelargest and 
most majestic trees in the American forest, and by no means rugged. 
Gilpin says that the elm of Engl and is most -graceful and regular in its 
shape, and that its limbs have a feathery appearance and look like 
immense plumes. Rugged is therefore neither poetical nor true. The 
elm under which the Quaker Penn signed his treaty with the Indians 
was 24 feet in circumference. It was blown down by the winds of 



4-> 

Heaven. The writer spent his boyhood near and played under the 
shade of a venerable elm about sixteen feet in circumference, and re- 
members it us anything but rugged. The roots of tins tree ea tend far 
and wide and cannot be thought appropriate in the picture of a village 
grave yard, in which probably they are rarely planted for ornaments, 
except a single avenue of them or of lime trees for shade, as in the 
grave yard at Stratford-upon-Avon. 

"Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap." 

The turf is usually a clod covered with grass and the body moulders 
in the grave which it protects, and not the heap of dirt which is 
already mould. 

" Then living turf's upon his body lay," says Dryden, 
''' And thegreen turf lie lightly on thy breast" — Pope. 

Hence I make old Seipio sod the grave of the Confederate officer's 
widow. 

" Each in his narrow cell, forever laid." 

This may be Cambridge Theology, but it certainly is not Christianity 
or common sense, if the dead do but sleep, unless it means a sleep eh '- 
nal. 

' ; The breezy call of incense — breathing morn, 

The swallow twittering from the straw-builc shed, 
The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing hord 

No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed." 

Is every morning in England breezy and incense-breathing, or only 
some during the season of Spring and Summer? And why should the 
eall or return of morning be termed breezy ? Swallows and swifts are 
on the wing at break of day in search of food, and do not stay 
to twitter. I found it so at Shakspeare's house. &tra.w-thatched roof or 
shed, and not straw-built were a better word; or the echoing horn, &c. 
Is the fox pursued in England before the rise of the sun and the hus- 
bandman, and the dew is exhaled, or after? 

"No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed." 

Why regret this ? To the rude forefathers of the hamlet, as to other 
old men, death is generally a rebel' from the care and toil of life, and 
it is not to be regretted that they are at rest. 

The writer of this criticism visited in Scotland, near Kirkcudbright, 
a laboring man, about 120 years of age, who had been working for his 
daily bread just a century, and had still to earn it by the sweat of his 
brow. Is death to be feared or welcomed by such a freeman, more? 
What twaddle, then, is it to regret that men are not raised from their 



44 

graves by the incense-breathing morn, the crow of the cock and the 
fox horn, and that they have to await the trump of resurrection? 

Let this suffice for the present. The whole Elegy (which I have 
known by heart for fifty years, and repeated a thousand times in whole 
or in part,) appears to me to be very open to criticism ; and I am very 
much of Dr. Johnson's opinion, who thought Gray's poetry obscure and 
feeble, and laughed at it. When I have time I shall go through this 
jem of British literature, this Elegy, which its author was some years 
in writing and polishing ( in his study, and not " in a Grave Yard," ) 
and subject it to the severe scrutiny of hyper-criticism, and I dare pro 
mise, without having studied the remaining stanzas, to point out many 
flaws in them. 

This critique is sent to the Editor of the London Punch, by the 
author of a letter to them, dated the 9th instant, as a rough and ready 
specimen of his handy-work in that line. It was written currente cali- 
mo,in the course of this forenoon, and pretends not to much merit. The 
Editors may publish it or copy any part or idea they may like, and 
and acknowledge its receipt or not as they may think English civility 
and Editorial Etiquette require, He himself always acknowledges the 
receipt of a letter or returns it to the writer, with or without comment, 
should its contents not be to his taste. How his writings may please 
"The London Punch" he does not know, nor, to tell the truth, does he 
care an English groat or Scotch baubee. He would like that paper 
to ascertain and publish the name of the mother of the first Earl of 
Murray, the writer's Scotch ancestor, about 8 degrees removed in his 
genealogical tree. Likewise to state the name of the royal lover of 
Mrs. Jordan, and when and where she died ? With due respect to "Lon- 
don Punch," the writer remains, its most obedient servant, 

JOHN M. GORDON. 

Norfolk, April 18, 1872, Box 640. 



[Extract from the unpublished part of Tableau, No. 16, 
of the Massacre of the Isle of Scio, being the Rape or 
apotheosis of the Lock of Hair of Berenice Gallatti.] 



"Come hither, my beautiful rover," that erst lost your faithful mat^ 
and wert Love's swift messenger between two young and pure hearts 
(cut in twain by the scimetar of the Turk) take in your softly cooing 
bill, the golden ringlet of Berenice (Greek for Victory-bringing,) Gal- 
latti, shorn from the temple of the hapless Maid of Scio by the Infidel 
Turk, bear it, circling your glossy neck, on the wings of Love, and 
with "bright upturned eye," wreath it around the "Corona Australis," 
the sparkling crown that shines in the Southern Heavens, between the 
limbs of Sagittarius, the Archer, and the Milky Way (type of mater- 
nal love, and fabled to have sprung from the full and overflowing 
bosom of the Queen of Heaven, and sister-wife of Jove,) there to re- 
main until young hearts shall cease to love, maternal instinct grow 
cold with Time and that starry belt, (fretted With Solar Systems, scat- 
tered like the dust of diamonds, ) shall become dim with age and cease 
to delight the eyes of men and angels ! And thou, Celceno ! foul bird 
of passage, prophet of Evil and one of the direful sister Harpies three, 
take in your foul mouth (reeking with slaver and venom, ) the greasy, 
stinking old wig, and false and rotten teeth (plugged with California 
gold leaf, made by the Boston beaters whom I have seen at their work i 
of a certain denizen of modern Athens whether male or female, Sena- 
tor Sumner or the wife of a dead doctor, it matters not I when laid aside 
at midnight, or at death, ( unfit for the coffin and the grave, i and carry 
your disgusting load, with its stench, that neither gods nor men can 
support (like bad Yankey poetry or rancid Goshen butter) bear your 
filthy burden on wings slow-sailing, like a carrion buzzard or a bull bat, 
and spew it out on the "Corona Borealis," the constellation of the 
"Northern Crown," (by Hebrews "Ataroth" called,) which is set west 
of "Bootes" and north of the "Serpent's" head. Bootes, the bear- 
driver, who would have slain his mother! Put the "false hair and cari- 
ous teeth" on the highest peak of the "Northern Crown," the fabled 
crown of Ariadne, (not Arachne, Mteoanian maid skilled in weaving, 
and by Minerva into a spider turned, "to spin its most attenuated 
thread," and weave its web, with warp and woof, in the dark and dusty 
cell of an old negro slave in Connecticut; a prisoner, I say, of onehun- 



46 

((red years, at Hartford, its seat of government!) but Ariadne, daughter 
of Minos, Minos, king of the lying Cretans (whom Paul rebuked and 
to whom Neptune sent a bull from the sea) and cast off mistress of 
Theseus, Theseus, king of ancient not modern Athens, father of Gre- 
cian Aristocracy, (with whom he shared his regal power,) ravisher of 
Ariadne, at last beloved by Bacchus, god of drunken men : there to re- 
main until the hand that formed the human mouth divine shall cease 
to fill it with enamelled ivory, and to crown the head of lovely women 
with the glory of her hair ! 

" Till Mazzaroth his wonted station cease to know 
And bright Arcturus, when and how, to bend his bow." 
Finis Coronat opus. 

I dedicate this apotheosis of the wig of Sumner ( a graduate of Har- 
vard) and of the false teeth of Dr. P. (who was killed, I will not say 
murdered, by Professor Webster, of the same college,) to Henry Wad- 
worth Longfellow, professor of — — and poetry in that university, and of 
which, for aught I know to the contrary, he may, like Hiram Ulysses 
Grant, be an L. L. D. I have plagarised the peculiar measure and 
difficult rhyth of his much admired Indian poem of "Hiawatha," to 
sustain my anglo-saxon [not mulatto) muse in its ambitious, Icarion 
flight, a flight, I fear, "nomina datura ponto." Bah ! as says orator 
Voorhees, speaking of the Radical party, bah ! bah ! black sheep ! have 
vou any wool ? Your wits were wool-gathering when you prostituted 
your muse and classic lore to abolition and to sing the praises of negro 
emancipation. The apotheosis of the lock or ringlet of Berenice Gal- 
latti was written at midnight, in a few moments, after returning from a 
lager beer saloon where it was meditated. That of the wig and false 
teeth was added next day by way of postcript. Non-theatre going 
people are, perhaps, not aware that the costumes of female performers 
in drinking saloons is quite "a la mode cutty-sark" as is that of the 
French ballet dancers, exhibited in the "Black Crook," to matron and 
maiden eyes, in" the National Theatre, at the seat of the blackguard 
rebel government at Washington, which the President sometimes 
attends. Having seen this licentious dance, (which the Emperor Bo- 
naparte is said to have banished from Paris) I declined taking a female 
relative of mine, or rather, advised her not to witness the spectacle, and 
she followed my advice. Such sights may not hurt some men, but they 
certainly are destructive of all female delicacy, not to say modesty. 



TABLEAU, No. 23. 



THE LAGER-BEER DANCING AID SINGING GIRL 

When I entered the green room, (a small place about ten feetsquare, 
with a large cylindrical cast iron Anthracite stove in one corner heated 
nearly red hot, ) I found her, to my surprise, seated on the top of the 
rough unplaned plank steps leading to the stage, with her face buried 
in both hands and weeping most bitterly. I had brought herapresent 
of an orange and a paper of French sugar plums or bon-bons ; for she 
was one of my favorites and epiite a little pet. Some of her fellow 
actresses were rallying, others laughing at and scolding her by turns. 
I approached her, laid my hand gently on her head, patted it and asked 
her what was the matter, in a subdued tone. She did not answer, but 
only sobbed the worse. I supposed there was something in mv manner 
or tone that touched her. I am yet to meet with the person that is 
not moved by gentle accents and kind words. She had been rehersing 
her part for the evening exhibition, she told me, after some little time. 
and that she broke down in that last song, "Oh, put me in mv little 
bed," and then she cried again like a child, tor she was, or looked, not 
more than fourteen years of age. It was plain to my eye that the lit- 
tle creature was thinking of her home and parents, if they were living, 
and who must have been respectable. I judged so from her manners, 
the neatness and good taste of her costumes and sensitive nature. Per- 
haps she had been well born and reduced by poverty to go upon the 
stage of a lager beer saloon. I sent the servant for a glass of wine and 
made her sip it to please me. She gradually recovered herself and be- 
gan to smile and talk to me. Her eyes were much swollen, her face 
and nose purple, and she looked absolutely ugly. "What a silly girl 
I am," said she, "to let such foolish things trouble me." but she con- 
tinued for a while to draw hysteric sobs, like a child that has got over 
a severe fit of weeping and is becoming composed, lying in its mother's 
lap, with its head upon her arm. My little actress had, doubtless, been 
crying for some time before I came in. By and by, after several calls, 
she got up and went upon the small stage to practice and reherse her 
part, and I sat in front the only spectator. She went through with 



48 

heavy step and heavier heart (in her calico gown,) her song and dance 
and I arose and went away, musing on the vicissitudes of life and 
thinking of Dr. Johnson's impromptu verses : 

Song sweetens toil, how rude so e'er the sound, 
All at her work the country maiden sings, 

Nor as she turns her giddy wheel around, 
Revolves the sad vicissitude of things! 

I had often seen her on the stage, all smiles and seeming joy, dancing 
like a sylph and singing like a bird, in the dress of a fairy, of a tissue 
like silver leaf, with a small coronet-shaped ornament of the same ma- 
terial on her head, and her long auburn hair (which did not curl, but 
was crisped,) hanging over her baby-fat and fair shoulders. A man's 
small short, swallow-tailed coat, with but one large button or bow in 
the small of the back, gave her round figure a half-rakish air. The 
tail or skirts of this quaint body coat were trimmed with gold lace, 
such as Federal officers wear upon their epaulettes. Her trousers or 
breeches of silver tissue, reaching just below her straight knees, weretrim- 
med with gold lace, and her buskins, or stage shoes, with high old- 
fashioned heels to add to the statue, were of crimson morocco and laced 
far up to the swell of the calf, with strings as yellow as the hose of Malvo- 
lio in the play. Her broad three-cornered blue silk cuffs were also 
fringed with gold lace, like the passion flower, which, as a boy, I used 
to admire, and pull to pieces in my father's garden at Falmouth, where 
I first saw the light, and plucked and scented the perfume of flowers. 
Her eyes were very large, fawn -like, but laughing withal, her nose large 
and too projecting and fleshy, her mouth somewhat coarse and teeth very 
white, of medium size and regular. When she danced and sang, she did 
not look the audience in the face, but turned her eyes upward, and seemed 
very earnest in her part, and if she were trying to do her best, and aim- 
ing to marry motion to music. Her shirt bosom, of fine white linen, 
with three Alasca diamond studs, came close up the swell of the neck, 
and, with a large purple ribbon knot or reel rose in the centre, com- 
pleted her costume. It was much more modest than that of some other 
actresses of a longer career, who dance nearly nude, before rude and 
vulgar men, who shout with loud laughter at every lascivious gesture 
or licentious expression. When she lies down at night, in her small, 
close room and " little bed, ' she, no doubt, thinks of her childhood, and 
it may be, in happy dreams revisits her home and parents, and, once 
more, walks in the flower garden, or plays under the shade of some 
spreading beach tree, whose curious shaped nuts she gathered with the 
companions of her early years, playing innocently around some crystal 



49 

spring. One of her favoriti songs bad for its burden " With my 
little bunch of rothes on my knee," which she sang with a childish 
" lispth." 

What shall we say of public spectacles in the Capital of "a great 

virtuous and free people, and the greatest nation " this side of the At- 
lantic, where tl is are paid to those who dress in thescantiest 
costumes and display th and all their charms and hes 
graces to the greatest pecuniary advantage, practising the most lascivi- 
ous movements and postures in their" Black Crook or < !an-Can," I which 
word every French scholar knows should be pronounced Ca Ca,) and 
other corrupting dances imported from France with Parisian costume? 
I have known several little dancing girls like the one mentioned, whom 
I sometimes visited and sat with for half an hour in the Green Room, 
always taking them like children some little present or.- •■_■, fir 
which they seemed • I. One was from the Valley of Vir- 
ginia and the banl nandoah. She would not talk much 
with me about the late i , or her friends, but told me she 
carefully educated and broug which I have no doubt. Another 
was a young Poll-., i tinexiou of mine by an intermarriage 
with the Herndons, a: she said, (a i of Capt. H. having mar 
beautiful and favorite niece of mine) but whether this be or 
will not avouch . .- st from Alabama, and is the subj eel of 
my Tableau entitled "The Polish Dancing Girl." I found all 

ed, reduced by m ■ to earn 

. for dancing and and I have no 

doubt that they were virtuous. Another of my lager beer green room 

acquaintances had adopted the child aiter woman, of not 

very temperate habits, and was rearing it very carefully. She had 

stood God-mother for it, and showed the little fellow to me one day. It 

was not unlike herself, for it has often been remarked, though I can't 

I rt that I hav< I rved the phenomenon, that 

children grow to be very like their nurses or the person they love, and 

whose company they keep, as I am inclined to believe true in the case 

of husband and wife. A malici< in calling 

herself G i the third Commandment, and 

; the name of the Lord in vain, as was said 'e's Oxford, 

:r in Baptism. I was assured, howe\ . , is that 

the child was not hers, and had noticed tha a ures of the mother 

and God-mother are not unlike. I mention the case chiefly to show 

the kind and liberal soul of an obscure Lager beer singer, who spent 

all her earning- on a child without a . and but a fraction of a 

7 



50 

mother. She sang Casta Diva, divinely. Could those New York mil- 
lionaires, William B. Astor, or Stewart, have done either of these 

things ; or even the negro philosopher Sumner, and will such big bugs 
sneer at my sitting in Green rooms and talking to little friendless Vir- 
ginia girls, the victims of cruel war, and say pooh, pooh, why sing the 
praises of a low actress, its only the old case, (a leading one) of the 
widow's mite ? We up here, North, or down East, have a higher law, 
than the scriptures. We pay our poor tax and let the public authori- 
ties take care of those ragged, dirty aud vicious little girls, that sweep 
the mud from our path where we cross over from Trinity Church on 
our way down Pearl street and to the gold exchange ; let them be sent 
to the poor-house, or to the orphan's asylum, or to the house of refuge. 
Out upon such twaddle ! In reply, I have only to say, I prefer to give 
away the widow's mite rather than to pile up millions upon millions 
like Pelion upon Ossa, and Olympus on both, until they sink me to the 
lowest depths of perdition. 

It is said, by the Scriptures, to be very hard for a. rich man to 
enter into the kingdom of Heaven, by which, however, I do not sup- 
pose it is meant to be impossible. Are the spectators who pay to see 
such exhibitions, free from all blame ? It is sad to think How many 
such little girls and young women, like those above mentioned, are in 
danger from the exposed life they lead, in the course of time, to fall into 
the depths of infamy, and end in rags and filth on the pavement or in 
the gutter, by the brandy bottle or a dose of laudanum, or possibly, in 
a felon's cell. Who are to blame for this, and what is the remedy? 
Christianity has elevated the woman in the social scale and man's life 
with them? Sumner would seat a negro alongside his pure wife. Should 
Christians nowadays degrade her? Who is there to mourn for such 
victims of vice, with such loathsome endings? No, not one ! Death, 
when it at last comes, is a relief to them and the world, in which they 
might have been happy and useful. Alas ! poor little street-sweepers 
and poor little lager beer and theatre girls ! Poor little orphans, for I 
fear some of you have no parents or kind friends at home to take care 
of you. 

[This Tableau was written Sunday, July 14th, 1872, (being the sev- 
enth Sunday after Trinity), and for the main part before breakfast, I 
being an early riser.] 



FURTHER EXTRACT FROM TABLEAU NO. 16, 

Or, a X-Mas Box on both Ears to the Powers that ought 
not to be in Washington. 



I saw afterwards on returning to my library, a small white boy sell- 
ing- newspapers. He was not bare-foot, like the little bare-headed rag- 
ged girls, whom I have noticed in years past, on a cold, wet day when 
"walking down Broadway," New York, sweeping, with a stick-broom, 
the running mud from the crossings of that great crowded thorough- 
fare, near Trinity Church grave-yaril, and Pearl street (where men try 
to worship God Sundays and Mammon six days in the week), and 
stretching out their little dirty hands (with eyes upturned) to beg and 
receive the small money I had to give, and which I have seen rich 
men "dressed in double-twilled cassimere and Souble-soled boots" refuse. 
Oh! it was to me a Southern slave-owner, most pitiful! Millionaires, 
without a cent to spare in charity on such an object, without a spark 
of human sympathy or one "touch of nature that makes the whole 
world kin." Surely the little workers in the cold mud were worthy 
of their wages. I have seen such little girls, a few years older, around 
the doors of theatres at night. They, of course, soon died in the gut- 
ters ! My newspaper crier had on shoes and stockings, too, a suit of 
neatly fitting clothes, black cassimere vest, pants and roundabout. On 
his fur hat a band of crape. His whole face, form and manners showed 
his gentle blood, and were in striking contrast with those of some rough 
and ready Irish boys of the same age and vocation, his competitors 
in trade, men in character and radicals in impudence. He told me it 
was his first day in business. I wished him success, and bought one of 
his papers. It's name is not worth chronicling. After reading it I 
tore it into slips, rolled them into balls, and therewith kindled my fire! 
Black Eagle of Virginia ! Bird of my State; imperial and not of prey. 
From your proud height, where you soar sublime, amid empyrean clouds 
charged with lightning, far above the waters of my late Lynhaveu 
home, (where you fight serial battles with the bald-pate bird of the Rebel 
Government), descend like a bolt from Heaven, swoop to earth, receive 
the spirit, the soul of the good old negro freedman, Scipio Africanus, 
since it has escaped its ebony casket and thrown aside his body (waxed 



52 

old like his brave dead master's military coat and bear the immortal 
part of the "good and faithful servant," up, up to the skies above, to 
be a new star added to the handle or tongue of "Charles Wain," or 
wagon, and to form with another small star* a bright cross therein; 
there to remain and shine to Northern eyes, while its "pointers" mark 
the place of the pole, (to which the needle is not truer than he was to 
his duty,") yea until the Heavens themselves shall wax old like a gar- 
ment, and be rolled up by the hand that made them, like a scroll. 



*Note. — There is a small star near the second star in the pan-handle, visible to 
the naked eye, which. I have selected as the abode of another good spirit — of a 
faithful slave servant, that long since left its ebony casket: my old nurse, Aunt 
Kate, as we all called her. She raised the seven oldest of my father's children, not 
one of whom received a fracture, a bruise, a burn, or any injury of the least kind 
whilst under her charge. In her dotage she lived at Kenmore. in the house with 
her son and his wife, who drank very hard, treated her step-mother most cruelly, 
and lead to be sold out of the State for her incorrigible vieiousness. The son's 
name was Gabriel. He was my grandmother's dining-room servant, and I well 
remember how she used, from the side door of her dwelling at Belmont, to call 
him from the kitchen, which was too far off to hear the bell distinctly. Her voice- 
was like a silver trumpet. Old Kate was my mother's maid, from the Winsor 
breed of negroes, and I think her parents or grand-parents were from Guinea, or 
the gold coast of Africa, imported, perhaps, in the "Mayflower," on her second 
voyage, by the '' Puritans," and carried up the Rappahannock and sold to my an- 
cestor, Col. Wm. Fitzhugh, of the King's Council in ye " ancient Dominion," who 
left a large number of African slaves to his four sons, William, Thomas, Henry 
and John, and their one sister, Mrs. Rose. Now T would like to know the name 
of any white man or woman in all New England who has done his duty better 
than uncle Scipio Africanus or poor old Aunt Kate ? Let Sumner and Greeley 
search the Puritan records and publish their names in the Tribune. 



Letter to Horace Gf\eeley, 

Written and Sent June 17, 1872. 



The above extracts from the unpublished part of Tableau No. 16, <>r 
"A X-Mas Box on both ears, &c, are sent to Horace Greeley, Esq., 
candidate for the "painted sepulchre," with the author's permission, to 
use and publish them, should he deem it of any benefit to himself or 
injury to his opponent, the imposter Grant. For many years, delib- 
erately, and in cold blood, as the editor of a newspaper^ of wide circu- 
lation, you did everything in your power to dissolve the once happy 



union of the .Stales, to reduce the neg] i to utter wretch* dness by 
cipation, and by civil war, th< iei -■ ry consequence of your preaching, 
to deluge the country in blood, in your utter ignorance of the 
plainest principles of political ry, or total disregard of them, 

you have been the advocate of a High Tariff, the inevitabl 
which is to give a bounty to labor in the North, and put a heavy 
burden on it in the South, on the shoulders of the poor slaves, whose 
friend you hypocritically professed to be. The North is now reaping 
the bitter fruits of its fraudulent legislation in strikes for higher wages. 
The power of the ballot-box will be in the hands of laborers, then woe 
to property and capital. Domestic violence will follow, and the rich 
and virtuous (if there are any such in the North), will be trampled 
under the foot of the swinish multitude; your cities will be at the mercy 
of mad mobs, and their gutters, sooner or later, flow with blood, as did 
those of Infidel revolutionary France. You yourself, may be one of 
the first victims, as its inventor was of the. Guillotin. 

Should you be elected president and the country be cursed with such 
an incubus for four years, y >u will go into office without any preparation 
or the slightest qualification, [except as a rabid and fanatic partisan editor 
of a Radical newspaper,] to discharge the duties of thai "high office." 
You will swear to observe, protect and defend the Constitution of the 
United States, which you never studied, cannot be made to understand, 
and do not value a: the north of a ten cent greenback note of paper 
money, which that constitution forbids. You will violate your oath of 
office every day, I do not say wilfully, but in utter ignorance and dis- 
regard of the Magna Charta of your country. I leave it to your own 
conscience to decide, the degree of guilt in such malfeasance. Far my 
own part, I have no doubt of the subject. Did I take the place of an 
engineer on a railroad and through unskilfulness throw the train off the 
track down a precipice, and mutilate and kill many passengers, in my 
own eyes, 1 would be a murderer. Apply this principle to the govern- 
ment of many States and Territories and many more people of several 
races and colors. Your administration, if you practice what you have 
hitherto preached, will be the scorn and derision of every honest, VirttK >us 
and intelligent man. Your cabinet will be filled with creatures conge- 
nial to yourself, and be far more contemptible than that of General 
Grant. He, perhaps, has the merit of physical bravery and overawes 
the masses with the fear of the sword. You, the country will nol fear, 
but onlv despise, for your course towards the South and the atrocious 
sentiments published in your infamous Tribune, which I have put as a 
text to this letter, shows that you would wage war upon mothers dying 



54 

of famine [with "privation in their eyes," are your diabolical words,] 
and children in rags! 

Oh ! unfeeling, cruel monster of iniquity ! with what eyes do you 
suppose the Parent of all looks down upon mothers dying of privation 
and their children clothed in rags ? This is what you wished the 
fathers and husbands of the South might be made to see ! With what 
eyes do you suppose your Maker looks on you ? Did he behold with- 
out compassion, [as did the people of New York, yourself among the 
number,] the little bare-headed, bare-footed white orphan girls, sweep- 
ing, in cold weather, the mud from the foot-path of the rich who crossed 
over from your magnificent Gothic Trinity Church [where you worship 
God on Sunday,] to Pearl street, where you worship Mammon the rest 
of the week ? This beam in your own eye you could not see ! You, 
forsooth, must rouse the conscience of the North, not at their own 
iniquities [you thought they had none,] but at the sin of the South, in 
holding in servitude the descendants of slaves imported and sold them 
by the Puritans of New England, and excite your countrymen to a 
war of rapine, rape, arson and murder! In the course of nature, as 
I said of the dead Bennett shortly before his death, you cannot live 
long. When you die, may you have, like him, a magnificent coffin 
casket, for your corrupt carcass, all the decorations, the handles, mount- 
ings and plate be of solid silver, made from Mexican half or whole 
dollars. Let the frame be of Pennsylvania cast-iron, covered with 
choice chesnut, or black walnut. Two crown plate glasses must com- 
pose the lid, [to show your dead face to your mourning friends,] one 
being covered with "tags" of white satin, trimmed with gimpure lace, 
the other open to display the breast and last expression of the dead 
Journalist. On an oval plate of pure silver, coated with a film of 
American gold, be inscribed your name and the day of your death and 
age. The linings of your last bed, (a mattrass made of negro wool,) 
are to be likewise of pure white satin with borders of cotton, not thread 
lace, and room enough left for the worms that are to keep you company, 
under the ground. Above your body, in Greenwood, let there be erected 
a pyramid, a monolith of Quincy Granite, deeply carved in Roman 
characters, (the letters being all gilt), with an appropriate epitaph, which 
I will myself write, when you too have shuffled off' this mortal coil, and 
you shall have at the same time, an appropriate apotheosis, but you 
will be as far removed from Scipio as the gentlemen of the South are 
from the degraded people of the North. 

I now ask you, Horace Greeley, where are your brothers and sisters 
of the South ? Before another year expires, you may stand face to 



55 

face with them before the Tribunal of your Maker? Where are your 
little New York sisters ? (The caption to this was 

''Suffer little children to come unto me, &c." 

an extract from the Tribune, Nov. 26, 1860, and 

"I will be a father, &c") 

The words of the extract are ''when the rebellious traitors are over- 
whelmed in the field and scattered like leaves before an angry wind, it 
must not be to return to peaceful and contented homes, they must find 
poverty at their firesides, and see privation i)i the anxious eyes of mothers 
and the rags of children. 

Thev were quoted and published by the Harper Brothers. The Tri- 
bune denied them, after the above letter was sent to Horace, which pinned 
the lie upon the sleeves of the Brothers, butjas I think,;clid not improve Mr. 
Greeley's case, and makes it much worse; for he thereby stultifies himself. 
Was not Mr. Greeley an advocate of the war, as it waxed hotter ami 
more direful ? Does he mean to deny that he virtually advocated all 
its necessary consequences, among which are famine, and pestilence? 
Before wdiose bloody steps march fire, and plunder, and arson, and rape, 
and murder, with gaunt famine and pestilence to track its rear? Or 
did he wish and intend a war carried on "without the use of villainous 
gun powder," and would lie "smell hispouncet box and say parmacitty 
is a sovereign remedy for an imvard bruise," for cloven skulls, crushed 
limbs and mangled bodies? No, you virtually preached against the 
South, a war of "horrors upon horrors' head accumulated," and your crv 
virtually was " give their houses to the flames, and their flesh to the 
Eagle! ' Deny this if you can ! And yet, as bad a man as you have 
been, I prefer even you to the monster Grant. He practiced what you 
only preached, and wrote in red ink. He used the sword as freely as 
you used the pen. He did not spare even his own men, but treated 
them as Falstaff called his ragged regiment, " Tut, food for powder, 
food for powder!" He has the ferocious courage of a tiger, that has 
lapped human blood and loves its taste. He would shed any quantity 
of it to retain power. But he is now impotent. His myrmidons (you 
among the number,) revolted at these atrocities, and the corruption of 
his rule, and he is now "a dead cock in the pit." You, I believe, would 
not shed blood with your own hand, nor head another army of invasion 
in the South, you would fear to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, or 
to use the bayonet instead of the ballot, at the polls, or the public money 
to buy the votes of States, and I have lately seen it stated, that you 
have declared, that you will not permit negro men to enter your parlor 



00 

but as dining room servants, nor colored beaux to mix with and c »urt 
your daughters. I dare say this may be true. I hope the Tribune may not 
I),- authorized to deny it, though you do virtually advocate and sanction 
those things by endorsing Sumner's Social Equality Bill. I think it 
highly probable -that when you are President, pledged for one term, you 
may veto such a bill and even empty the United States prison at Al- 
bany of the Ku-Kiux convicts, ( who you must know are innocent me a, 
and advise Congress to have them torn or burnt down like the Bastile, 
the key of which was sent to General Washington and used to hang at 
Mount Vernon. These are some of the reasons, as at present advis d, 
why I shall probably vote for you in November. I have no doubt thai 
you are an arrant coward, and would fear to commit treason, as Grant 
& Co., have done, by suspending again the writ of Habeas Corpus and 
waging war against sovereign States. The spirit of the Nation is at 
last aroused, and should you follow like Martin Van Buren did in the 
footsteps of your predecessor, you may thank your stars and not me, 
and men like me, if you are not hung from the Capital's walls 
sheep-killing dog as high as Hainan. Finalty, Hiram Ulysses ■ 1 
is (Cambridge being judge) an L. L. D.. and L. M. IX, (four liquids 
and one mute), that is to say, a Doctor of Ch i! Canon and Martial law. 
You are only an A. S. S., that is to say, to use a ; i General 

Washington's, " a i curvy fellow, " a shallow satrap, for whom Senator 
Sumner will stump it — macte virtute i " Bah !" I quote the cla 

a, and very eloquent exclamation oi my correspondent, Mr. 
Vorrhees, member of Co i ; from one of the North Western . 

(once belon Virginia, ) which he too mean • to stump for the nom- 

inee of Cincinnati and the endorsee of Baltimore. (Oh Regan ! Oh Go- 
neril ! ) On the 23rd of April I had written Mr. Greeley another letter 
on the subject of the nomination to be made at Cincinnati, not having 
the slightest expectation, or suspicion, that he was to be the candidate, 
or the fortunate one. I shall publish that letter at some future day, 
her with several letters to other politicians of the Radical or Con- 
servative parties. The letter now published is the rough draft, or first 
sketch sent to Mr. G. The first copy was much more severe, and con- 
tained expressions, which I do not retract or care to make public. I 
trust they may have the desired effect, and that Mr. G. will give me 
due credit for sparing him, in the letter now published, and this note 
added thereto. Finally, though no prophet, I venture to predict that 
Hiram Ulyses Grant, P. U. S., L. L. D., and L. M. I)., will haul up 
and end in a lager beer saloon, (admission and a bad segar 25 cts. I sit- 
ting and lounging solitary, in a broken back chair with but two sound 



57 

legs, (requiring a surgical operation, ) dressed in a double twilled English 
cassimere sack coat, sipping sour punch and hot drains mixed with 
four liquors, viz: still-burnt whiskey, presented by his ring of that 
name and title,) burnt brandy, doctored with spirits of turpentine I good 
for an attack of mania << potu, Holland gin, or scheidam schnaps, fla- 
vored with the flowers or berry of the elder bush, and yankee rum, dis- 
tilled from New Orleans melasses [melas, being the Greek word for 
black, and asses requiring no explanation, but ''lasses", I remember the 
poet Burns sang so sweetly and loved so dearly O !) "holding between 
his front teeth thereby displaying them to the spectators," an American 
segar, with a Connecticut wrapper of tobacco, grown near the United 
States Armory at Springfield and manufactured at Hartford, [both of 
which cities or places. I visited just before the late civil war,] and end- 
iug, I say, in smoke and ashes? Greeley "an old man burdened with 
the cares of State and ready to beg a little earth for charity," like the 
cardinal with a red cap, " who was begot by butchers, but by Bishops 
bred," will retire with Mrs. Greeley, to cultivate husbandry at his farm 
called Chappequa. This word of Indian sound, [aias! the poor Indian !] 
is composed of three syllables and may be analysed thus: aqua is latin 
for water, of which "straight-laced," Mr. Greeley, like myself is very fond, 
and is seen to drink nothing else in public or private; to chap, means to 
crack or cleve, the hands or the earth, while a chap means, anatomi- 
cally, the upper or lower part of a beasts mouth, says Johnson. The 
extra letter p, I have explained in the unpublished part of Tableau No, 
16, or "a X-Mas box on both ears to he powers that ought not to be 
in Washington, " and the farmer at Chappequa fully understands m\ 
meaning, though the public may not, but shall in due season. Mr. G's. 
country seat, has an historical meaning and interest, for it is the very 
spot at which the spy Andrew [with a pass in his pocket from the Con- 
necticut traitor, Benedict Arnold] was stopped and captured by two or 
three American soldiers, who were gambling at cards, on a Sunday, I 
believe, and yet could not be bribed by the offer of a horse and a silk 
purse full of British guineas or sovereigns to "let him slide!" This 
homely expression of Horace Greeley's of a profound policy, in relation 
to the secession of sovereign slave States of the South, he now doubt- 
less, begins to repent not having adhered to, and the North and espe- 
cially New England to perceive, that it would have saved them from 
the wrath to come, for the day is not far distant, "when the King shall 
have his own again." Ehue ! jam satis. 



TABLEAU, No. 24. 



THE WOUNDED CONFEDERATE OFFICER, 



Written June 20, 1875 



Time — The Month of ^pril. Hour— ^bout Sunset. 



In a remote valley of Virginia, at the close of the war of invasion 
on the South, [generally called the rebellion or civil war, by those who 
strove to conceal the truth by a bare-faced lie,] a Confederate officer 
" who had done the State some service," and they knew it, lay on the 
bed of sickness, slowly recovering of a severe hurt received in battle. 
Through the middle of this once happy valley, meandered a small brook, 
which had its source in a clear chrystal pool, shaded with large white 
and red oak trees and filled with mountain or skeggar, usually called the 
golden speckled trout. This exquisite little lake, about forty feet long 
by twenty feet wide, was of an oval shape, like a Psyche mirror, and 
situated nearly half a mile above and west of the cottage, and in this 
valley, which was four or five miles long, the sun rose and set the greater 
part of the year. Near the green bank of the trout stream and on the 
north side, about one hundred yards below the farm house, was a copious 
limestone spring, over which was built a stone dairy of the same mate- 
rial, from a quarry near at hand. It was whitwashed within and with- 
out, and shaded by a large weeping willow, now in green leaf, one huge 
trunk of which [nearly half the whole tree,] had been broken off in a 
thunder gust or when struck by a bolt of lightning. It drooped its long 
graceful branches and shot its thirsty roots into the surface and chan- 
nel of the rippling, whirling, bubbling, leaping, runnning, laughing 
stream. The farm house or cottage, built from the same quarry with 
the dairy, stood on a round knoll, falling gently on all sides, surrounded 
by shade and fruit trees, and attached to itoii the south east slope, was 
a small and very rich and well worked vegetable garden of an acre or 
two in area, with flower borders for roses, lilacs, snowballs and a South- 
ern sunny aspect, a thing thought to be very necessary in Virginia. 
The lawn all around was a green sward, with a narrow winding path 



59 

leading to the dairy and spring. The carriage road approached from 
the East. The cottage was one story and a half high, with porticoes 
around the four sides for walking in bad weather, and three rooms, a 
parlor or dining room and two chambers on the first floor, with three 

smaller ones and a store room in the attic. The stone walls were blue, 
the natural color of the material before it is burnt snow white for lime 
to cement with. The parlor floor was of heart of pine and being pol- 
ished every morning with a heavy hair brush and waxed, one could 
almost see his face in it "as in a mirror dimly," and it was almosi as 
smooth and slippery as glass. By the head of the sick soldier's bi I 
his old widowed mother, aged about eighty, knitting him a pair of 
woolen stockings for winter wear. She was tall and stately and com- 
manding in her appearance. Her hair, which in her youth was raven, 
was now just turning gray, and she had never lost a tooth. She wore a 
mob cap. Her features were very Scotch, with high cheek bones, her 
nose rather short, which gave a long upper lip and a great appearance 
of character to the mouth. Her dress was of black silk, the kind com- 
monly called lutestring or more correctly lustring, from its shining sur- 
face. She took snuff, sometimes Scotch, more generally Lorillard No. — 
from a small silver box, gilt inside and of English manufacture. The 
mother and sou had talked of " Auld Lang Syne " and of her young 
friends and ancestors, all the morning; there was now a pause in the con- 
versation and she was in deep meditation over the past and future. The 
officer too, was musing and looking at the sun setting in banks of gold 
and silver [sight so beautiful to the eye of the painter, "in search of the 
picturesque,"] behind the hills and among the tall trees, which bound- 
ed his vista on the west, as he had done daily for several weary months. 
He had his right thigh bone shattered with a grape shot in leading a 

charge at the battle of , [it is not worth naming, Virginia knows 

both it and him,] and his limb had been cut off far above the joint. 
The surgeon had told him, as I heard him say, "Had I time and you 
the aid of careful nursing, your leg might be saved, but as it is, the safer 
course to preserve your life is by amputation." I pause here to ask 
Parsons Swallow and Newman, of Washington, D.C., [who thought the 
God of Hosts was on the side of the North, and said he had raised up 
his champions to chastise the South,] whether they think the Almighty 
gave men legs and limbs as marks for cannon-balls, grape shot and 
Menaie rifle bullets ? Does He not by his natural processes do every- 
thing to cure such wounds, and to prevent them, too, by the mode in 
which, with infinite skill, and with parental care, He has constituted 
the human form divine? Has he not expressly forbidden them except 



60 

in an extreme case of self-defence, which he allows all his creatures, all 
I believe without exception. It may seem paradoxical and inflated, 
but I will say, from the highest monarch on his throne, to the lowest 
insect that labors in his little house and home which he loves and de- 
fends in the coral caves and on the banks and reefs of the orange-groved 
Florida, crowned by the prison-house of the Dry Tortugas ! Bah ! to 
such wicked, foolish theology, and faugh ! to such prayers and thanks- 
givings, they are worthy only of a priest of Timbucto, of Fetish reli- 
gion. My friend, the Confederate officer submitted to the painful sur- 
gical operation, without a murmur or a groan. In a few weeks, he was 
able to go on a journey, on his bed, in an ambulance, over miry and 
rough and cut-up roads, and here he was once more in manhood's prime, 
[maimed for life,] at his boyhood's home, amid the meadows and hills 
and groves, over Avhich he has roamed and bounded in his school days 
" tickling trout, " or catching them with the fly or grasshopper, and 
hunting the hair with a pack of small tan colored beagle hounds from 
the Black forests of Germany, near Hidelberg, on the Rhine. Hide)- 
berg! whose students have their wits muddled by lager beer and bad 
tobacco, whose manners are softened by the "faithful study of letters," 
who make the Greek and Latin tongues their supreme delight, who 
read them by day and meditate them by night, " Vos exemplaria 
( xrseca," &c, whose capacity for the waters of the pure Castilian fount is as 
great as that of the tapster of the "big Tun" of the elector of Baden, was 
for Hockheimer wine, and who cut and gash each others faces with the 
sharp pointed foil, without a button, and carry their scared countenances, 
without blushing, into the lecture room of their teacher or Profess* >r ! 
Prohpudor! proh mores! I have visited their fighting room, which 
reminded me of a certain Maryland cock-pit, near Baltimore. A loud 
knock was heard at the front door, the mother arose to enquire wdio it 
was. groped her way out by means of a cane, [she was nearly stone 
blind,] and in a moment or two returned, looking pale and dismayed. 
She said a man, a common soldier, had brought him important news 
from the army. " Let him come in at once," the officer cried with im- 
patience. The traveller entered, weary, dusty, haggard. " Colonel, I 
have sad news for you. General Lee surrendered with his whole 
army on the 9th of this month, at Appomattox Court House, and 
I have come, running nearly all the way to tell you !" These were his 
words. " Oh, my country; oh, my poor old mother State," cried the 
wounded officer. " I turned my face to the pillow," said he to the 
writer, in describing the scene, "and wept like a child. Then, for the 
first time, I felt the pain of my wound, and the amputation and loss 



61 

of my limb." These were his very words, by which I saw the depth 
and the breadth and the strength of that Southern feeling in the .-hive 
States which separated, and will forever separate that wicked, cruel and 

mercenary war of invasion from all other wars. Will the North still 
say, " Let bye-gones be bye-gones," without one word as " to fair play 
for the future ?" Will she insult common sense and common decency 
by saying " We forgive you the trespasses and deadly injuries we have 
done you." And we think, as good Christians, knowing, as we do, the 
Lord's prayer by heart, that you ought to bury those things, and all 
future things of the same kind in oblivion, and not expect us. (as Mr. 
Boutwell has happily expressed it, ) to shake hands over the bloody 
chasm ? If you have the audacity to offer the South your 
bloody shaking hands, without a full indemnity for the past and 
security for the future, I, for one, return you my left and then my 
right fist clenched. If you say with Cromwell, (the Puritan 
and thererore hypocrite), that you tried to save the South " by this 
bitterness, much effusion of bloc'd. through the goodness of God" — I 
reply why did von not, [to use Greeley's vulgar and wise expression] 
" let the South slide?" If the Union was so valuable and precious to 
her, that she could not live out of it, she would have come back like a 
prodigal son and remained quietly in it. If she found by experience 
that dis-union was far preferable to an union that had ceased to protect 
and was plundering her, is there any reason under the sun, why she 
should have remained in it, from a foolish veneration, [unworthy of a 
free negro], for a word that had changed its meaning entirely? If the 
Revolution of 1776 was not a national crime neither was the secession 
of the slave Sates, not to put it <>n much higher ground as I shall do 
at some future day. 

•' My son " said the aged mother, rising and laying her withered 
hand upon his head, [her left hand, on the index finger of which she 
still wore her marriage ring, a broad and thin one, set with her own 
and her husband's hair and marked, under the chrystal, with their ini- 
tials], " my brave, my noble boy how I envy you those manly tears! 
I have been young and tender hearted like you, but am now too old to 
weep. The last tears I shed were when I buried your father. Ah, my 
weary pilgrimage ! Weep not for your State, but for your poor old 
blind, good for nothing mother, who prays for death. Oh that I could 
once more clearly see by the light of heaven the face of my only son 
before I die." She sank into her seat, [an old fashioned Windsor chair] 
she wrung her withered hands, with them she covered her sightless 
eyes, tears came to her relief [how sweet they were J] and the mother 



62 

and the son lifted up their voices and wept aloud together !— The sol- 
dier was the only witness of the scene. 

In this tableau the writer's mother sits for the picture of the matron. 
She resided in the town of Fredericksburg, where she died lately, and 
which she left a short time before its bombardment by the Northern 
barbarians. The house of her oldest son, next door to the one in which 
she lived was burnt to the ground by a bomb-shell. She was totally 
blind, nearly stone deaf and paralyzed, and was buried [aged ninety 
three] near the tomb of Mary, the mother of Washington and " the 
moss grown cloven freestone rock," on my father's farm of Kenmore, 
part of the battle field of Fredericksburg. Her mental faculties were 
not at all impaired and seemed to grow brighter and stronger as she 
approached the grave. The Confederate officer is a friend of mine, 
and the person mentioned in a letter to one of my Washington female 
correspondents, who entered the public sitting room on crutches, while 
I was reading my Tableau, No. 15, or Letter to General Grant, to a 
circle of a dozen gentlemen of my acquaintance, at the very moment 
before I had reached the passage beginning "before his sealed sight, or 
eyes starting from their sockets, may pass in vision, an innumerable 
throng of the wounded, the halt and maimed for life, dragging their 
crushed forms along, or supporting their tottering, curtailed limbs on 
crutches," calm and composed up to that point, " it was too much for 
me, I broke down " [like my little lager-beer saloon singing girl], and 
I had to pause several times and recover my voice, which was choked 
with emotion. He remained and heard me read that terrible descrip- 
tion to the end, without moving a muscle or a change of countenance. 
The rest of my audience, kept their eyes fixed upon the floor. The 
South is filled with such men, whom Greeley, and Grant, and Sumner, 
and the whole pack of Northern rebels barking at their cry, call per- 
jured traitors. I hurl this scene and the scenes like this, from which 
Virginia's grandeur takes its rise, in their faces and tell them to their 
teeth they Lie. 

I had intended to make this charcoal sketch end abruptly at the 
word lie, but my genius touched mine ear and whispered mentally to 
me, try and describe the last moments of the mother, as they really 
were, and touch the closing scene, with any expressions you have 
gathered at death beds, from that of your own little sister down to the 
present time. I will endeavor to do so, though my heart is heavy with 
the sad news that a female relative and near connexion whom I knew 
and loved from my nurse's arms, has just left a family circle desolate ! 
She lived and died at Fredericksburg, and to-day will lie in the family 



63 

burying ground near the " moss grown cloven freestone rock." The 
old mother's grief was more than human nature could bear, her fea- 
tures became distorted, and she fell from her seat in a swoon, struck 
down by paralysis ! The son arose, maimed and suffering as he was, 
raised her in his strong arms, and laid her gently, like a sleeping child, 
upon the bed. He then took his place beside her and leaning on his 
left elbow fanned her quietly while he watched her heavy breathing. The 
soldier called the old nurse from the kitchen (she was their only ser- 
vant of many slaves left to them, the rest had been set free and had 
gone away, bag and baggage to enjoy freedom and poverty and vice) to 
wait on her dying mistress and he took his seat in the passage at the 
door of the chamber of death, to be within call should anything be 
wanted during the night. Hour after hour passed and the son kept 
his position, like a faithful sentinel at his post. The room was lighted 
by the moon, just in the wane. Shortly after midnight, the patient 
revived from her swoon and opening her eyes said : " where am I, and 
what o'clock is it ? How long have I slept ? Oh if this were death ! 
I have had a beautiful dream, ending in a dreadful vision. I saw in 
my sleep a throng innumerable, clothed in white raiment, they were 
moving and singing, as they went, a hymn I never heard before. But 
at the end'nany were in red, their garments seemed dyed in their own 
blood, and, oh my God, I saw a multitude of people who had been 
maimed and wounded, as if on a dreadful field of battle! Hark ! What 
is that music that pierces my dull ear! It's a fife and I hear a drum 
that has a rattling sharp sound as if made of metal." "Mother," said 
the wounded officer, "try and sleep again, you have only had a pain- 
ful dream and in the morning you will feel better." The dying matron 
raised herself in her bed and extending her shriveled arms, said "I am 
growing lighter and lighter, and yet I can't see! The light seems to 
shine down from above and pierce my brain like a beam of the sun. 
Listen ! What is it I now hear ! It is the voice of my mother and my 
father, too, as they used to call me in my childhood. Mama and papa, 
I am coming, I am coming, I am coming!" There was something 
awful in so aged a person thus using those words of childhood. Her 
voice died away like the accents of a departing spirit, finer and finer, 
till sound became silence. Her old face became radiant with joy, 
her arms dropped to her side, she fell back on her pillow, her son gave 
one long and heavy groan, as if his heart would burst, her lips quiv- 
ered, she opened broad her sightless eyes and was dead ! 

Come to the bridal chamber Death, 

Come in the Earthquake's shock, the ocean storm. 

Come as thou wilt in any form, 

But thou art terrible. 



64 

Colonel, said the soldier, "Do not take on so. Do not pull your hair, 
my good Colonel, she is better off. Be the man I have seen you on the 
battle held, when you cried, follow me, my brave men ! You never 
told us to go ahead. Remember Bull Run when our old Stone- 
wall said if we can't do better we will give the enemy the bayonet." The 
officer smiled and seemed comforted. " You will make me give death 
itself the bayonet," was his reply as he was conducted from the room, 
propt on his crutch, and leaning on his soldier's arm. 

The aged mother lies by her husband's side, under the shadow of 
the lightning struck weeping willow. A blue lime-stone slab, with an 
appropriate inscription, marks the spot, where her bodv, like an old 
cast off garment, moulders into dust. 

The text quoted from Scripture was : 

"He maketh the blind to see, the dumb to speak, the deaf to hear." 
" I am the Resurrection and the Life." 



■BnKB 



THIS TABLEAU 

i 

DEDICATED, THIS TWENTY-EIGHTH DAY OF JULY, 

EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-TWO, 

TO 

THE MEMORY OF THE FEMALE RELATION, . 

MENTIONED IN THE CONTEXT, 

AS BURIED THIS DAY. 



LE 



ENTITLED 

X-Mas Box on both Ears to the Powers that ought 
not to be in Washington. 



Look at that little whito orphanboy tl l -of a noble 'sire, who 

walked from a distant part of Virginia, his native State, clothed in the 
decent though threadbare garments of Poverty and Grief, and impell- 
ed by ambition and by want, to ask au office in your gift as Presidenl 
of the once United State- ! Footsore from his long ji urney, he slowly 

ids, with weary limbs, your cold Massachusetts marl 
half so cold or hard, as the selfish hearts of its Puritan population, he 
knocks timidly with beating heart, at your front door; the frontdoor of 
the Nation i ach | ortaland avenueto which was wide opes 

to the 'humblest American citizen.' In a low tone and with gentl 
cents, he states the cause of hie coming and i will it be believi 
c untrymen,) he is rudely repuls ir mulatto < per, (with 

impudence more than radical, if possible, - and told "the Presidenl 

ou. Go about your busine! s!" The very business about which he 
had come alone so long a journey and ha ight to come! He had 
read in his bible "knock and it shall be opened." There was a time 
under the rule of Virginia Presidents, when such a noble boy would 
have been received with open arms, instead of having the door slam- 
med with mulatto, if possible wors than radical impudence, in his 
timid, tearful face. By Washington he would have b< en r< c< i ' id with 
open arms, honored and folded to his great breast, which throbbed for 
every part of his whole country, for which he was ever ready to pour 
forth his best blood. By precept and example the sage of Mounl 
non would have made a great man out of his little hero and their 
might have gone down to the remotest posterity, to the "last 
syllable of Recorded Time," linked in Fame and (dory indissoluble! 
Washington! whose grand exan I whose character is 

a reproach to your own ! 

I have said in my letter to you. written on the death-day of Wash- 
ington, December 14th, 1872, or. X-Mas day old style, for I L- 
connect them together,^) that " vour own party are ready to r 
9 



66 

ffitfi contempt, as unfit to be even its filthy tool, and that you will be driven* 
from office by your own creatures and be followed by the scorn and 
loathing of every virtuous mind." That prophecy has already began to- 
be fulfilled. Leaders of the Senate, Schurz 7 Sumner, & Co., and of the 
press, Greeley, et cetera, have slipt the collar and left the leash in your 
impotent hands, a pack of blood hounds, [mOre thirsty for office than 
those with which Jackson's minion, Van Ruren hunted the noble Osce- 
ola and his Florida Indians through Laurel up to Okefinokee swamp, 
were for blood,] is close at your heels in full cry upon a hot scent, and 
you will e're long be brought to bay and devoured like the antlered Ac- 
teon by his own dogs, (read the story in Dryden's translation of Ovid's 
metamorphoses.) You will be pursued by them like Orestes, (who slew 
his queenly mother,] was followed by the Furies, but unlike him, you wilT 
have no Temple of Refuge ! The glorious Temple of our Liberty is in 
Ruins ! Erected by the patriotism and wisdom of Revolutionary he- 
roes and worthies, it is in Ruins ! Like the beautiful and sublime Par- 
thenon at Athens, (standing on the acropolis and dedicated to Minerva 
with its miracles of sculpture and of painting by Phidias and Praxitiles r 
not Persico and Trumbull, of tin pot Connecticut,) and the fallen Corin- 
thian capitals and prostrate broken Ionic columns of the Constitution,, 
a consolidated mass of undistinguishable rubbish ! Go now Chief of 
Rebels and blood stained warrior ! Drunk not with Glory but with 
brandy or gin or still burnt whiskey, with a face of Corinthian brass, 
go reeling drunk and [with an Havanna segar between your teeth,] 
sit down in a Pennsylvania cast-iron seat, on Capitol Hill, near the 
marble statue of Washington! 

I say of Washington, as if in Judgment, seated in his curule Chair, 
or Chair of State, and pointing with his finger to Heaven, in awful,, 
and to you unapproachable grandeur, of Soul and Character! Sit like 
Marius, the great Radical of Rome and proscriber of its noble citizens, 
sat in exile amid the ruins of Carthage and contemplate, if you can, 
[as I have done,] the ruin of the Constitution of your country, to which 
you have contributed all in your power, after swearing in the presence 
of tens of thousands of your countrymen (myself among the number,) 
and, oh, false, perjured Traitor, in the presence of your Maker, and 
upon your Bible oath, to preserve, protect and defend it ? You will 
not drop one tear, unless it be a maudlin one. You will not heave a 
patriot's sigh, for you knew not its inestimable value. You prized not 
the price of precious blood by which it was bought and cemented, and 
you have not a thought, or care, or feeling for posterity, or for anything 
under the sun, but your own miserable self or dirty pelf! 



67 

Go, compound of dog and hog, return to your vomit and your wal- 
lowing in the mire of vulgar vice and money-making by malversation 
in '''your high office!" For three long years and more, (Caligula, the 
Roman tyrant reigned three years and nine months,) you have held the 
rudder of the good old Ship of State, the Constitution, [Guerrier, the 
smuggling ship were now a better name,] and you are now about to be 
put ashore by your own crew, as was the English captain of an explor- 
ing vessel, on an inhospitable and unknown strand. Your fate is to see 
that ship change its course and sail away in an opposite direction, 
" Homeward bound. " Standing alone, on a cold " moss-grown cloven 
rock," on some ice-bound, beetling promontory, lashed by the cold, 
angry waves of an Arctic sea, you will strain your startling eye-balls to 
catch the last glimpse of its floating flag, proudly floating, from the top- 
gallantmast head, yea, nailed to the skye-scraper, its ample silken folds 
emblazoned with stars that shine with undiminished, with renewed lus- 
tre — the Star Spangled Banner, of which "the North, the South, the 
East, the West" were once so proud, and which was respected in every 
ocean and sea whitened by American canvas; the firs' love and admira- 
tion of its Friends, and the terror, hereafter, of its Enemies!" You 
will hear around you the howding of beasts, ravenous beasts of prey, 
rising above the howl of the wind, and you will have to face, on that 
lone shore, without a friend, fierce winter, (the winter of old age, with 
its scanty and grey locks, grizly bears) and Grim Death. Unlike the 
great English Captain Hudson, ( who has given his name to a great Bay,) 
you will not be sustained by the consciousness of having done, or at- 
tempted to do, that easy thing, your Duty — 

Nuda in ignota, Palinure, jacebis arena ! 

Pale Pilot! naked will yon lie on some unknown stand, 

Your flesh the prey of Eagles, your bones gnawed by the grizzly band. 

When you leave the White House, that painted sepulchre, aid the 
President's Chair, prone may you fall, (after you have died of the wet-rot, 
and have not been preserved, like -a serpent in alcohol,) recum- 
bant on your belly may you go, and lick the dust ! "with many a scaly 
fold, voluminous and vast," " like a wounded snake, drag your slow 
length along," creep into the basement of the Capitol, amid the hisses 
of your Rebel followers, (as Milton painted his hero, Satan,) and hide 
your flattened head beneath the pedestal of the statue of the Goddess 
of Liberty, still standing in the deserted marble halls of the old House 
of Representatives, with a half-coiled rattlesnake near her feet, which, 
as if of instinct with life and full of venom and aversion, raises its 



head, points its forked tongue and hisses at the cringing, stooping, •; 1 >- 
scene statue, of that dead, eur dog Lincoln! There, coiled in the 
lowest basement of the capitol, (in which you took your oath of office, 
administered by that fishy Salmon Chase, Chief Justice of the disuni- 
ted States,) there, remain, and feed upon the musty, mouldering public 
documents I the dirty job i, of your and the Radical reign, until that 
free stone painted tomb of that rope of sand, the Constitution, topple from 
its pinnacle, [from the crown of the head of Bellona, Goddess of War, 
exalted above its three storied dome], and tumble into ruins, like the 
charter of your country's liberties, to crush with its fragments, i the 
debris of a nation -, your flat head and bury your viper fangs forever 
and forever, without a hope, or chance of resurrection, lest they might 
be scattered and sown like the teeth of the huge serpent of Mars, slain 
by the Pcenecian Cad mis, (who introduced letters into Greece, vide 
the metamorphoses of Ovid], and spring up a bristling corps of armed 
men to fight and kill each other! I have already in " my Carnival " 
made an apotheosis of your ignoble soul to the hinder part- of < 'aprl 
eornus, let this serve for the final transformation of our body, "when you 
have shuffled off this mortal coil ' and with it, the human face and form 
divinej From the mouldering and polluted ruins of the Rebel < 
tal, polluted by your festering car - horns and Can- 

ada thistles spring. The running blackberry, the Virginia creeper 
and chiefly the poison oak, cloth them with their annual verdue 
decorate them with their black and red fruits! But before you go to 
final abode, [a tomb in the basement of the Capitol, your Westmin- 
ster Abbey,] or while on your way, creeping thither in the dust, listen 
to the Evening hymn of two orphan children, [a little boy and his sis- 
ter,] with their nurse and old Scipio Africanus, sung in a 
cemetary at set of sun : 

Thou crescent moon with silver ray, 
That lovest to greet the dying day, 
Again thou usherest in the eve, 
That mother took her final leave 
Of us her children ! 

Mother ! in thy place of blissful rest, 
With' our dear father, now in peace, 
Hearest thou the sobs that rend our breast? 
Oh ! when shall we too, find release, 
Like you dear mother! 



69 

The golden hours on Angel vvings 
Flew o'er us and our father, 
But sweet to ns as Angel sings, 
Sang our dear, darling mother ! 
Ave, our lather in Heaven ! 

To decorate thy cold, cold grave, 
With earliest flowers of spring we came. 
The dying sun, the sea death lave, 
Bright monarch, robed in light and flame 
Ave, our saviour in Heaven! 

Mother dear ! oh dear blest shade ! 
See'stthou thy children now depart? 
Watch o'er us when our prayers are said, 
And sooth the sighs that break our heart, 
Kiss us in dreams, dear mother ! 

The nurse, who had a soft ami sweet voice, set the hymn of the 
orphans to an easy and favorite Methodist air, which the children fol- 
lowed easily. Old Scipio, too, cut in, but he " broke down " in the 
third stanza and bowed his grizly head in silence. Scipio Africanus, 
the ignorant negro, "baptised in Confederate fire" had a touch of 
feeling for these poor children, whom Horace Greeley, the scholar, 
wished their starving mothers to behold in rags ! Prayer, says my 
Episcopal hymn book, 

Is the simplest form of speech 

That infant lips can try, 
Prayer, the sublimest strains 

That reach the Majesty on high. 

The first time I read this beautiful and to my mind, orthodox hymn 
[composed by Mr. Frelinghuysen, of New York], I committed it to me- 
mory. I now, in conclusion, advise Hiram I T lyses Grant, L.L.D., and 
Horace < rreeley, late editor of the New York Tribune, to "go and do 
likewise." 

[These Tableaus are to be continued, with an occasional letter to a 
Radical Politician, a Foreign Minister, Bishop or Potentate, or a fa- 
miliar epistle to a literary or female correspondent.] 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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